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ANN PATCHETT MEETS JOHN UPDIKE GARRET KEIZER ON STUPIDITY AND TRANSCENDENCE

HARPER’S MAGAZINE/SEPTEMBER 2021

HOW WE GET FAKE NEWS WRONG 9/11 REVISITED: UNPUBLISHED PHOTOS FROM GROUND ZERO HARI KUNZRU ON HOW THE WORLD CHANGED NEW FICTION BY VINCE PASSARO

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DEFENDING HOMES. STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES. RESTORING THE LAND. MEET THE PEOPLE BUILDING THE WORLD WE NEED. “This is a truly important book, piecing together the story of what is, cumulatively, a massive uprising for environmental justice. I’ve gotten to know and work with many of these activists, and everyone should get a charge of optimism from their stories, as well as a sense of the daunting odds they face down so skillfully. We use the word ‘heroes’ a little loosely sometimes, but these people surely are!” —BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“[An] illuminating anthology. . . . Lim crisscrosses the country and selects her proﬁle subjects wisely, resulting in an invigorating survey that breaks down stereotypes about tree-hugging coastal elites and highlights just how much change can be achieved at the local level. Progressive policy makers and environmental activists should take note.” —Publishers Weekly

Get involved at www.theworldweneed.com

FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 343, NO. 2056 SEPTEMBER 2021 HARPERS.ORG

Letters Past Imperfect Easy Chair Death Valley Harper’s Index Readings The Mothership Machine Yearning Math Rock Late Edition Apocalypse Nouns Faucian Bargain Fan Mail Moments of Silence And . . . Report BAD NEWS Selling the story of disinformation From the Archive In the Dark Portfolio WORLD OF NIGHT Letter from Sher Toghi WHEN THE RAIDS CAME The war’s toll on one Afghan family Essay THE PORTRAIT GALLERY What the American Academy of Arts and Letters taught me about death Letter from Alaska EATING THE WHALE A personal history of meat Essay THE THIRD FORCE On stupidity and transcendence Poetry THE BOOK OF BREEZES Fiction WOMEN CORINNE DOES NOT ACTUALLY KNOW Reviews NEW BOOKS BOSTON GOTHIC Atticus Lish’s novel of illness, masculinity, and murder DEEDS OF DERRING-DO Jon McGregor’s Antarctic experiment Puzzle Findings

2 Harry Hamilton, Stan Brown 5 Hari Kunzru 9 11 Mark McGurl tender buttons Richard Powers’s bittersweet symphony black and white and red all over worldly wise geologisms gift of the jab a neighbor cries peafowl Vince Passaro Romeo Alaeff, Kata Geibl, Ana Maria Micu, and a 3rdeyegirl dons an optical protrusion 25 Joseph Bernstein 33 Aldous Huxley 34 Hale Gurland 41 Andrew Quilty 53 Ann Patchett 56 Wyatt Williams 65 Garret Keizer 70 Chris Nealon 73 Rebecca Makkai 83 Claire Messud Christian Lorentzen Christopher Tayler 95 Richard E. Maltby Jr. 96

Cover: Illustration by Dan Bejar

LETTERS

John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher Editor Christopher Beha Deputy Editor Matthew Sherrill Managing Editor Stephanie McFeeters Senior Editors Christopher Carroll, Timothy Farrington, Joe Kloc, Katherine Ryder Art Director Kathryn Humphries Editor Emeritus Lewis H. Lapham Washington Editor Andrew Cockburn Poetry Editor Ben Lerner Web Editor Violet Lucca Associate Editors Elizabeth Bryant, Will Stephenson Deputy Art Director Alyssa Ortega Coppelman Assistant Editors Will Augerot, Bindu Bansinath, Megan Evershed, Alex Kong, Leon Pan Production Manager and Designer Stephanie Cuenca Editorial Interns Rebecca Cadenhead, Sara Krolewski, Charlie Lee, Sam Needleman Art Intern Yuqing Liu Contributing Editors Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, Wes Enzinna, Tanya Gold, Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, Scott Horton, Frederick Kaufman, Garret Keizer, Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Richard Manning, Clancy Martin, Duncan Murrell, Rachel Nolan, Vince Passaro, James Pogue, Francine Prose, Ellen Rosenbush, Jeff Sharlet, Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson, Barrett Swanson, John Edgar Wideman Contributing Artists Lisa Elmaleh, Balazs Gardi, Samuel James, Nicole Tung, Tomas van Houtryve Contributing Designer Sheila Wolfe Vice President and General Manager Lynn Carlson Vice President, Circulation Shawn D. Green Vice President, Marketing and Communications Giulia Melucci Vice President, Advertising Jocelyn D. Giannini Virginia Navarro, Assistant to the Publisher Kim Lau, Senior Accountant Eve Brant, Office Manager Perri Smith, Marketing Assistant Cameron French, Advertising Operations Coordinator Advertising Sales: (212) 420-5773; cameron@harpers.org Sales Representatives Detroit: Maiorana & Partners, Ltd. (248) 546-2222; colleenm@maiorana-partners.com For subscription queries and orders please call:

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Past Imperfect Matthew Karp is right to worry that reducing America’s racial history to biblical or biological terms [“History As End,” Essay, July] leaves out critical social and historical context. Slavery was evil, but to call it our “original sin” or to argue that it is in our DNA is to ignore what we have learned about how and why human beings inflict unspeakable cruelty on one another. Yet, it’s critical to engage with the politics of the past, because they’re also the politics of the present. Slavery was a caste system whose vestiges are still apparent today. In its American variation, it was the central feature in a business model that put profit above Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response. Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012, or email us at letters@harpers.org. Short letters are more likely to be published, and all letters are subject to editing. Volume precludes individual acknowledgment.

shared humanity. It proved to be so “successful” a model that people were willing to destroy the nation to protect it. Humans are predisposed to rationalize self-serving behavior, even when that behavior is inhumane and grotesque. The racial pseudoscience of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is far from dead today. Perhaps the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, but progress is unlikely if such harmful fictions remain hidden in plain sight. Harry Hamilton Columbia, Md.

Where the Wild Things Are The comfort Elisa Gabbert feels in the presence of strangers [“A Complicating Energy,” Essay, July] reminded me of the comfort I feel alone in the outdoors. Edward Abbey found solace outside, working as a park ranger. Thoreau,

too, found companionship in nature. When officials taped off hiking trails during the pandemic, I knew we were really in trouble. Already the nets had been taken down from the tennis courts, the hoops from the basketball courts. But this? Once, before the pandemic, I went hiking and met a man from France. His wife had left him, and he was hitchhiking across the United States. It’s either this or medication, he said. Like Thoreau and Abbey, he was undertaking an experiment. I wonder whether it worked: when you’re outside, you don’t know what small interactions might heal you. You don’t know what’s going to happen at all. We need that unpredictability. Or at least I do. Stan Brown Victorville, Calif.

The Most Interesting Man in the World Thomas Frank’s piece on Jon Meacham and his great-man theory of presidential history [“The Man Who Loved Presidents,” Review, July] brought back two memories, one from the Seventies, and one from the Nineties. In the post-Watergate period, as profanity-laced tapes trickled out of the Nixon White House, a talking head whose name escapes me— white-haired, articulate, and supposedly worldly—lamented in a tone of bewildered disappointment: “I always thought there was something ennobling about the office of the presidency.” I was in my twenties at the time, and my first thought was: Really? Decades later, during the Clinton impeachment, we were confronted with the blue dress, the semen stain, rumors of the infamous cigar, the meaning of “is.” And another talking head, a man in his sixties, also white-haired and supposedly worldly, said, “I always thought there was something ennobling about the office of the presidency.” My only reaction was stunned silence. After Donald Trump, not even Jon Meacham will be shaking

his head on national television anytime soon, confessing his disappointment that the presidency was so far from ennobling. Tom Sullivan Toronto

Getting

Severance Package I’m sympathetic to Agnes Callard’s view of ethical breakups [“Breaking Points,” Readings, July], but I wonder about separations where her principles may not apply. Working through his own shortlived engagement, Kierkegaard writes of a fictional young man who must end his relationship with his fiancée. The young man’s love for her turns him into a poet, but in the process, he becomes someone different. A friend advises him: “In any relationship of love that cannot be fulfilled even though begun, tactfulness is the most offensive of all.” Years ago, my best friend ended our relationship. The decision was unexpected and unilateral; it devastated me. That friendship was the core of my life. It took years of therapy for me to build healthy relationships again. The abrupt severance was excruciating, but I’ve accepted that there may not have been a better course of action. Even if there was, I’m certain there are cases where talking things out or trying to shift to a new dynamic distorts the deeper issues, cases where continuing a relationship would ultimately make the expartner worse off. Like Callard with her friend, my companion realized that he and I understood our relationship in different ways, and he couldn’t truthfully communicate this injury to me without making things more painful and confusing. The last thing my friend said to me before our breakup was, “I will never tell you as a story.” I felt confused by this sentence for a long time. Now I understand it as a promise not to lie. Megan Fritts Duluth, Minn.

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EASY CHAIR Death Valley By Hari Kunzru

n the morning of September 11, 2001, I was asleep in my room at the Beverly Laurel Motor Hotel near West Hollywood. I’d just come to the end of a six-week road trip down the West Coast, intended partly as research, but mainly as a gift to myself. After years of work, I’d sold a novel for a lot of money. I’d rented a ridiculous little Japanese convertible; it had seemed cool at first but its novelty had worn off. It was cramped and uncomfortable and attracted cops, and now it was sitting in the motel lot, coated with freeway dirt. I’d been in L.A. for a week or so, hanging out with some friends of friends, and I’d had a good time, but I was ready to go back to London. The phone rang. It was one of my new L.A. friends. She told me to turn on the TV. Twenty years is a long time, and the images have been repeated so often that I’m suspicious of my memory. What did I see and know then, and what did I find out later? I remember the North Tower burning, the anchors speculating about a commercial airliner gone accidentally off course. Then, as I watched, the second plane hit the South Tower. It must have been early in Los Angeles; 9:03 am New York time means it was 6:03 am for me. Maybe what I saw was a replay. I don’t remember how long we stayed on the phone. I know that a couple of hours later I went to the diner downstairs and ate breakfast. By then, I’d watched the South Tower collapse. People were jumping from the North Tower. The anchors didn’t know how to talk about it. The news reports were relentless, disorienting. A plane hit the Pentagon. Another crashed in a field. Lower Man-

hattan was being evacuated. Then the North Tower too collapsed. I sat at the counter, spooning something into my mouth, and listened to a group of men speculate about what had happened. The diner was popular with Hollywood hipsters, which in 2001 meant trucker hats, Hawaiian shirts, and orange-tinted sunglasses—ironic sartorial nods to the cocaine Seventies. It was obvious, apparently, that we would be next. If they hit New York, they were definitely going to hit L.A. But where? No one could think of a target. The Hollywood sign? The Getty Museum? They decided the most likely spot was the Capitol Records Building. Years later, I would sit in a cinema in Santa Monica and watch as an enormous CGI tsunami hit the beach just outside, destroying everything, including the building I was in, the real and the virtual fusing in a single heady moment. There was something similarly disturbing about the tone of the discussion at the diner, a thirst for the images on the screen above the counter to come down and occupy our reality. It was as if a big movie were in production, and once again these outof-work actors hadn’t been cast. I went back to my room and sat on hold with the airline. American airspace had been closed indefinitely. Eight days at the earliest, sir, the woman told me. Probably longer than that. I phoned the rental company. I would still need to give the car back in the morning, or go in and sign another agreement. I have little memory of how I spent the rest of the day. I know I drove to a newsstand on Sunset to buy a paper, only to find it sold out. People were displaying American flags, trailing

them out of car windows, waving them on street corners. I had the car radio tuned to a rock station. “This one goes out to all you ragheads!” screamed the host, cueing the stomping opening drum break of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” The anger was palpable, and already there was a consensus about who was responsible. The next morning I drove to the airport to give back the convertible. Police cars were blocking the freeway on-ramps, but I had a foldout paper map, and I figured I could find my way on surface streets. I must have made a wrong turn, though, because I hit the airport far away from the terminals. I could see aircraft parked behind a chain-link fence, but I wasn’t sure which way to go. This is how, on one of the tensest days in American history, a dark-skinned young man with a full beard came to be driving a dirty white convertible with out-of-state plates very slowly around the perimeter of LAX. It’s hard to think back to those first few days after the attacks, that particular hair-trigger psychological state we existed in. The only thing anyone could agree on was that the world had changed: 9/11 was an epistemological event. At a stroke it removed all certainty, and people reacted in all the ways people do when that happens. As soon as they’d pulled me over, the two police officers got out of the car. I noticed, with the dissociation that comes when something is happening in reality that you’ve seen many times onscreen, that they had their weapons drawn. I sat very still, my hands on the wheel. They kept a wide space between them as they approached.

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On my drive I had frequently been reminded of my English accent. People, particularly rural people, often pointed it out, and sometimes asked me to repeat words, just for fun. “What seems to be the trouble, officer?” I asked now, trying to infuse my voice with as much Jeeves-and-Wooster charm as I could. Almost at once, the cops lowered their weapons. I didn’t talk like an Arab. I wasn’t a threat, just a fool, a clueless tourist who didn’t have the common sense not to screw around near an airport during a national emergency. The magic power of my accent would last only a few more months. That December, a young English plane passenger would try to detonate a bomb built into the sole of one of his hiking boots. Ever since then, we have shuffled through airports in our socks, and the U.K. has produced enough jihadis that English accents no longer protect brown-skinned men from extra scrutiny by law enforcement and immigration officials. But in September 2001, my voice sounded the old way, the quaint way. The police officers gave me directions and I drove off. I swapped the dirty convertible for a sensible, anonymous sedan, and tried not to think about how close I’d come to getting shot.

fter that, I didn’t want to be in L.A. any longer. This was less because of the encounter with the police than the mood of the people around me, the sense of intense unfocused anger looking for an outlet. I didn’t feel angry so much as horrified and numb. I needed to be on my own, so I drove out into the Mojave Desert. I have always found deserts clarifying— their harshness, their simplicity, their inhuman scale. Driving to Death Valley was, I understand, an overly literal response to what had happened, but it did me good to be away from rolling news, from the same images repeated over and over, the plane entering the right of the frame, the orange burst of its impact, the people jumping, falling against the vertical stripes of the building’s facade. ¸ Later I would see documentary footage of firefighters in the lobby of the North Tower. They flinched at irregular crashing sounds, heavy weights

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

falling onto the canopy outside. It was the sound that would haunt me for a while after that, the thump of bodies hitting the canopy. Whenever I imagine the horror of being in the World Trade Center on that morning, these awful sounds are part of it. This is another way memory plays tricks on us. At the time, there was so little information about what had happened. There was nothing visceral, nothing concrete, just images of dazed people covered in pale-gray dust, walking uptown. I think it took years for me to piece together a narrative. At the time, all I knew was that there had been a huge loss of life, and now there would be war. I walked across a salt flat and picked my way around the ruins of a ghost town, one of many dead white places defined by the absence of people. I hiked through sand dunes, ripples perfectly sculpted by the wind, crisscrossed by rattlesnake tracks, until my brain began to feel as if it were cooking inside my skull. I remember only one encounter from my time in the desert. I was drinking a beer, watching the towers falling on a screen above a bar. A man sitting a couple of stools down offered the unsolicited opinion that the Jews were behind it. The whole thing was cooked up, he said. I told him I didn’t think that was true, and we argued. He asked me if I was a Jew.

y the time I moved to New York in 2008, 9/11 conspiracy theories had blossomed. The internet was riddled with discussions of controlled demolitions and holograms and whether jet fuel could melt steel beams. On the seventh anniversary of the attacks, I went down to what was now known as Ground Zero and watched people who were now known as 9/11 Truthers arguing with other New Yorkers. A man with a placard got into a shouting match with a man in a firefighter’s dress uniform who was almost weeping with rage. In 2011, I went there again, on the night President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The atmosphere was confused and brittle. Some people stood with candles, praying for the dead. Others partied and waved flags. I took a photograph of some young men who

had climbed a lamppost and were spraying the crowd with champagne. In 2001, four days after the attacks, I drove to Las Vegas, covered in sand. I had sand in my shoes, in my pockets, in the turnups of my trousers. The signage on the Strip displayed patriotic messages: caesars palace: one nation under god, next to a billboard advertising Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage. Vegas had remade itself from the swinging Ocean’s 11 city into a sort of microcosm of the world, or at least its picture-postcard essence. You could ride a monorail or stand on a moving walkway and travel from Paris to the Caribbean, or back in time to ancient Egypt. On one side of the strip stood the New York–New York casino, its frontage styled to look like the Manhattan skyline. It had become a site of mourning. People had attached things to the railings: fireman’s helmets, flowers, children’s paintings and poetry. Across the street was the Aladdin, where the slots were arranged under a giant golden oil lamp, and you could shop at the Desert Passage mall, an Arabian Nights–themed souk lined with restaurants and rug shops. It was completely empty. I don’t really gamble, and I wasn’t in the mood for the other kinds of entertainment Las Vegas offers. I spent two days walking around, mostly inside, putting on the miles up and down the Strip, occasionally playing the slots or buying food, but mostly trudging onward, as day turned to night on the simulated skies. People were doing ordinary things. I watched a bride and groom get ferried up and down a stretch of Venetian canal by a singing gondolier. Families posed for pictures, or grazed at the gigantic buffets. I heard that someone had shot dead the Sikh owner of a gas station in Arizona, mistaking him for a Muslim. Somewhere on my journey, I saw a Sikh family—parents, children, and grandparents—hovering uneasily by a concession stand. They were obviously terrified. The grandfather had a flag in his turban and another in his shirt pocket. Each of the children had been given one to carry. Las Vegas is not designed for seriousness, let alone grief. The very architecture of the Strip—the absence of windows, the accelerated day-night

cycle of those cloud-flecked ceilings— is meant to induce forgetting, to help you live in the moment. So there was something awkward about the public displays of patriotism and faith. I spent a long time in front of a Chanel boutique, where an expression of condolence had been printed out and displayed in the luxury brand’s distinctive corporate font, inadvertently giving it the appearance of an advertising slogan: at times like this, we all feel american. I soon headed back into the desert, sitting on hold with the airline in various cheap motel rooms. A week or so later, I secured a seat on a flight back to London. I made it home, but of course part of the change wrought by 9/11 was that there was no home to go back to, no place sheltered from the consequences of that day. A new normal came down like a giant shutter over the old. We now remember the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 as a time when people (at least people who lived in large global cities, and didn’t pay much attention to the Balkans, or Rwanda) could imagine that they were at the end of history, that all that remained of the age of ideology were a few skirmishes, before the advent of a pure capitalist technocracy. Instead, we had fifteen years of the idiocy of the “Clash of Civilizations,” and a ruthless binary logic reinforced by the Bush Administration’s disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq, almost guaranteeing that the widely supported fight to avenge the victims of 9/11 would turn into a quagmire.

n early November 2001, I flew to New York to start a prepublication book tour. The city was still papered in missing person flyers. On my first evening, I walked downtown from my hotel and stood on a street corner, watching the rubble being cleared from the floodlit World Trade Center site. I saw a single angled shard of one of the towers still standing, the distinctive scorched lattice that has become part of the iconography of 9/11. I was not the only person spending the evening there. Every vantage point was occupied, each observer keeping a discreet distance from the others, all quietly thinking their thoughts. Every-

one seemed to have come alone. Nearby, a Chinese woman had set up a stall selling 9/11 commemorative merchandise, the first I had ever seen. I stayed on the corner until I began to shiver in the cold, and then made my way back uptown. That book tour was grim. Checking in for each flight, I was handed a boarding card printed with a row of S’s, which meant that I had been “randomly selected” for extra screening. The private companies responsible for airport security had yet to hand the job over to the newly created TSA, and nobody knew the protocols. Everyone—passengers, cabin crew, ground staff—was managing high levels of stress. I was sitting at the gate at Dulles, reading a book, when I was surrounded by security staff and taken away, in full view of the other people about to board my flight. After I’d been thoroughly searched, I was delivered back to the plane, just before they closed the doors. The walk down the aisle, the looks of fear and hostility from the other passengers, is seared into my memory. What happened on 9/11 took place at greater-than-human scale. Each of us has only our single window onto it, through which we peer and try to understand. My unpleasant walk down the aisle is just one in a chain of memories from twenty years of the war on terror. I remember the 7/7 attacks in London, when terrorists blew up tube carriages and a bus, and the police shot dead an innocent Brazilian man at Stockwell station. For weeks afterward, I would make eye contact with other dark-skinned men as I sat on the tube, each of us carrying our possessions in plastic shopping bags rather than backpacks like the bombers had used. I remember marching against the Iraq War, and feeling despair as it went ahead. I remember hearing a motorcycle backfire as I sat on a café terrace in Paris, and instinctively ducking under the table, as did dozens of other people. I remember a beat of silence as we all recovered ourselves, and got back to drinking and conversation. Everyone has such memories, of days haloed by an aura of fear. Everyone has their own version of the phone ringing in my motel room, the voice telling me to turn on the TV. Q

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HARPER’S INDEX Portion of unruly-passenger incidents on U.S. flights this year that involved face masks : 3/4 Number of new microorganisms that have been discovered on urban mass-transit systems since 2016 : 11,676 Of new viruses : 10,928 Estimated percentage by which parking demand will decline across the United States by 2050 : 40 Number of New York City parking spots that were converted into outdoor dining areas during the pandemic : 8,550 Percentage of U.S. streets closed during the pandemic that have reopened or are scheduled to reopen to traffic : 85 Number of people admitted to Phoenix’s burn unit last summer after contact with hot asphalt, sidewalks, or sand : 104 Number of those people who died : 7 Minimum portion of the world’s mature giant sequoias that were killed in a single wildfire last year : 1/10 Percentage decline in California’s monarch butterfly population since the 1980s : 99.7 Estimated number of additional humans who will be exposed to disease-carrying mosquitoes by 2080 : 950,000,000 Number of serious injuries that occur at Amazon warehouses for every 200,000 hours worked : 5.9 At other U.S. warehouses : 3.1 Percentage of Europeans who would prefer to have packages delivered by a robot or drone instead of a human : 35 Who would like to see artificial intelligence replace some of their legislative representatives : 51 Minimum number of candidates for local office in Mexico this year who were murdered before the June elections : 34 Percentage by which atheists are more likely than religious Americans to oppose the death penalty for murder : 76 Percentage of Americans who thought religion was gaining influence in the United States a year ago : 38 Who think so today : 16 Percentage change this year in the share of Democrats who regard the country’s moral values as “poor” : −29 In the number of Republicans : +65 Percentage of Democrats who have a favorable view of critical race theory : 86 Of Republicans who have an unfavorable view of it : 91 Percentage by which Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they have a “good idea” of what it is : 34 Factor by which high-income college applicants are more likely than low-income applicants to write essays about mental health : 1.5 About sports : 4 About failure : 4.5 Number of U.S. prisoners who requested compassionate release from the Bureau of Prisons during the pandemic last year : 30,969 Number of these prisoners whose requests were approved : 36 Minimum number who died while their requests were pending : 35 Chance that a European Union resident who received public services last year did so through a personal connection : 1 in 3 Percentage decrease in the number of families reporting depression and anxiety after the last two rounds of stimulus checks : 20 In the number of families reporting food shortages : 42 Percentage increase last year in the sale of vacation homes in the United States : 16 Portion of U.S. millennial homeowners who have “some regrets” about purchasing a house : 2/3 Date on which China announced that it would allow couples to have a third child : 5/31/21 Percentage of women surveyed in the central Chinese city of Xi’an who say they would like to have three children : 8 Percentage of American men in relationships who think their partner is more attractive than they are : 37 Of American women in relationships who think so : 14

Figures cited are the latest available as of July 2021. Sources are listed on page 55. “Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

HARPER’S INDEX

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READINGS

[Essay]

THE MOTHERSHIP By Mark McGurl, from Everything and Less, which will be published next month by Verso. A version of this essay appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of American Literary History.

here is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica as the quintessential Amazonian literature. It depends what aspect of Amazon one decides to put at the center of one’s inquiry. Is it the great quasiimperial sprawl of the company’s many technical and logistical achievements, its seemingly unbounded ambition to multi national if not multiplanetary commercial presence? Or is it instead the cozy scene of consumption, of fulfillment, the home? To the extent it is the latter, this erotic genre, featuring the infantilization of the hero and hypermaternalization of the heroine who lives to suckle him, provides a concentrated image of the company’s fabled “customer obsession”: the way it attempts, as the mother does with her child, to minimize the delay between demand and gratification. Doing so, it inspires in the customer a sense of dependent well-being, or commodity in the archaic, affective sense. In “Help Wanted: Adult Baby Diaper Lover,” from The Mommy Claire Chronicles: Part II, a handsome jerk nicknamed Chris Alpha is lured

into the bathtub by an older woman he thinks he can seduce, Mommy Claire. Instead, it is the first step in his rapid transformation into Little Girl Chrissy: She took extra care drying me off and it’s strange but I could feel the love in her effort . . . I closed my eyes, enjoying her attention. That’s when I felt the soft smooth skin of her breast against my face. It was very comforting and when her nipple grazed my cheek, I did what came natural, suckling her into my mouth and feeding like my inner child needed nourishment. Mommy Claire cuddled me while I nursed on her breast and it felt wonderful. If I had any concerns in life they were gone at that moment. It truly was blissful.

It’s all so sweet, though not without its menace, as that loving care becomes a kind of bondage. Indeed, with its shifting of the dom role from the alpha male to the mother, presented here as the ultimate service provider, ABDL erotica is a reminder that Amazon’s customer obsession is ultimately an investment in its own market power, a posture of servile domination. Turning the image of patriarchal power as depicted in Fifty Shades of Grey inside out, the mommy-dom is in some ways a softer agent of customer loyalty possessing, as this text has it, “some magical quality that made me feel all safe and warm inside, a place I never wanted to leave.” Mommy’s erotic ministrations are retractable at a moment’s notice, leaving in their wake an image of wholesomeness. This is the wholesomeness

READINGS

of mother love and also of domestic provision via Amazon, which nobody would accuse of being a sexy company, as cheerfully phallic as its logo might be.

he fate of Amazon, like that of any business, will ultimately be determined by how

[Recommendation]

MACHINE YEARNING From “Sex with Robots: Therapeutic Challenges and Opportunities,” an online lecture presented by Markie Louise Christianson Twist, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, and hosted by the International Online Sexology Supervisors.

igisexuality is a sexual experience that depends on the use of advanced technology. Sex-toy consumers and people who experience attachment to digital technology were the firstwave digisexuals. Back in twelfth-century Japan, mechanical dolls were used for entertainment in theaters and private homes, as well as for sexual practices. Everyone has the right to feel love and connection, and Japanese people have a history of connecting to technology in spiritual ways. The scholars Beatriz Yumi Aoki and Takeshi Kimura surveyed Japanese sex-doll owners in 2020 and found that 58 percent believe the dolls have a heart or soul. This is more than just sex. Maybe it’s even about love. A digisexual is a person who is attracted to technology and doesn’t require a human partner. Digisexuality is pretty awesome. If someone has interest in having sex with dolphins, which most people would consider nonconsensual, they now make robot dolphins. It’s also age-affirming. For people who have an interest in young people, they don’t make childlike dolls yet, but they might someday. There are definitely lots of positives. So far, most robots look like humans. I’m not going to lie to you—they’re going to start looking like other things. Do you have a strong connection to a piece of technology? Mine is my 2006 BlackBerry. It’s in a drawer, and I sometimes get it out just to rub the buttons. If you love something, does it need to love you back in order for you to feel connection? Think about the story of the Velveteen Rabbit: loving the doll so much that it became real.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

successfully it profits off the labor of its hundreds of thousands of employees. What makes the company distinct is its penetration of the home, the scene not of production but of social reproduction. One of the interesting things about the labor of care is how entwined it tends to be with consumption, as when a mother cooks and serves a meal to her family. One wonders how deeply entwined social reproduction and consumption are from a broader perspective. We know of course that, come the twentieth century, the relation of capital to the working class was complicated by its recognition of the latter as a source of growth in consumer demand often funded by credit-card and other debt. In the cauldron of the so-called consumer economy, at the risk of crisis, any accounting of the “necessities” of life must gradually become more generous if more stressful in their attainment. Consumption is not simply the terminus of the line of production. It is a laborious origin point in its own right, as necessary as any other, in the perpetual motion of a circuit more complex and far-reaching than the strictly accumulative one leading from investment to reinvestment.

s the woman buying groceries for her family a consumer? Yes, but she is also a reproducer, which is to say, an unpaid laborer doing the work that has to be done if the world is to continue. And what about the single person pouring herself a bowl of cereal? Does it make sense to say that she is, in that act, performing an act of unpaid labor to maintain her status as a wage earner? Why not, since it is hard to see how the self-reproduction of the labor force is any less reproductive than housework done for others? How about when she reads a book on her Kindle on her lunch break—a self-indulgence that might be keeping her sane, readying her to endure the rest of her shift? Can reading, which we might think of simply as cultural consumption, become visible as a kind of reproductive labor? And what if the novel she’s reading turns her on? Is masturbation at bedtime part of the homework she does to ready herself for more wage work the next day? These examples suggest a new frame within which acts of cultural consumption might be understood, one that can help us see Amazon as the protagonist of contemporary literary history. If the keynote of Amazon’s performance is the digital dissolution of the book into the general consumer economy, as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” becomes the “Everything Store,” this does not mean that literature in the Age of Amazon no longer participates in the construction and maintenance of our collective and individual identities, only that that construction is continuous with self-maintenance in a grosser, corporeal sense. The scene of social reproduction is

Photographs by Kata Geibl, from the series There Is Nothing New Under the Sun. Geibl’s work was on view in June at Silver Eye, in Pittsburgh.

perhaps most crucially the one in which babies are born and raised, where family members are fed and clothed, but it is also a scene of intensely embodied cultural reproduction. Recent literary-sociological methodologies ask the properly economic-sociological and materialist question of where and with what institutional support literary experience comes into being such that it can even begin to have ideological force. In this case, setting the scene of literary consumption in the home, it asks what the utility of literature might be from the reader’s perspective, what it does for her as part of a repertoire of self-care such that it is perceived as a worthwhile expense of money and time.

n Edan Lepucki’s 2014 novel, California, most of the commodities of our consumer culture are gone. Lepucki’s take on the postapocalyptic genre briefly came to fame in the context of Amazon’s notorious dispute with the publishing conglomerate Hachette over e-book pricing. Lepucki’s novel was offered as an example of a young writer falling victim to Amazon’s thuggery. Appropriately enough, in the ruined southern California of her novel, all commodities are very expensive, and, for the protagonist, Frida, some achieve talismanic power as tokens of van-

ished plenitude: “In a world so disconnected from the past, her connection to these objects had been her only strategy for remaining sane. It still was.” By the end of the novel, fearing for her unborn child, Frida has moved with her husband Cal into one of the restricted communities dotting the wasteland where life retains a militant semblance of middle-class normalcy. Hers is called Pines, but there is also one up north started by Amazon, another by Walmart. The attachment to random domestic commodities she felt amid the scarcity of the wild was in retrospect only the first step in a return to the exploitative, Amazonian model, justified now by the needs of children: “Frida knew she was thinking only of her own family, that she had begun to see them as special: separate from the rest of the world with all its attendant suffering and corruption. Maybe it was wrong, but it was the choice she had made.” While it does not celebrate this choice, the novel does not seriously challenge it either, as though it wants, as literary fiction so often does, to remain realistic even as it envisions a radically altered world. Can a mother in her situation be expected to do anything other than, in effect, sign up for Prime? Dream on.

READINGS

Realities Intrude . . . Her Voice That, a painting by Ana Maria Micu, whose work was on view in July at Mind Set Art Center, in Taipei, Taiwan.

[Musicology]

MATH ROCK By Richard Powers, from “One, Two, Three . . . Infinity,” an essay in the anthology Ways of Hearing, which will be published this month by Princeton University Press.

y father wanted his own orchestra. He couldn’t read music and his tastes tended toward the beer hall, but he loved singing and had a clear bass-baritone: “Blue Skies” at morning that changed, by night, to “Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep in the Deep.” When he sang, our small house on the North Side of Chicago turned bigger on the inside than it was on the out. A junior high school principal, my father believed in giving his children the keys to every kingdom worth entering. We each played something: clarinet, French horn, guitar, viola. My instrument was the cello. The five of us would hold

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

forth from different corners of the house, often at the same hour of the afternoon, in a riotous Midwestern nightmare out of Ives. I remember, at nine, grinding away for what I was sure was hours—This is, a symphony, that Schubert wrote and never finished—only to be stunned, when coming up for air, to discover that no more than fifteen minutes had passed. None of us loved practicing except my father. No matter how harsh the squeaks and clashes, he had his band. The exhilarating monotony of practice was, for me, the paradox of childhood writ small. I lived between unbearable excitement and mind-crushing boredom. Those two states formed the twin poles of each day’s endless question: Is it tomorrow yet? Late one Sunday morning at the age of nine, I came to my father almost weeping from tedium and begged him to entertain me. He told me to read a book. I said I’d read every book on my shelf. He went to the bookcase in his own room and picked out a small volume: One Two Three . . . Infinity, by the renowned physicist

George Gamow. I opened to a table of contents dense with adult type, grim and thrilling. But the biggest thrill of all was that my father thought I might be equal to this. I struggled. But the first part of the book was called “Playing with Numbers,” and I’ve always loved that thin edge between struggle and play. Page five had a drawing of a poor ancient Roman, taking forever to write out the number one million, which I could do in seven digits. A stunning idea formed in my head as if I myself had come up with it: however high a number anyone wrote down, I could write one higher. The thought was intoxicating. Before long the book was claiming something far wilder, something that even now, more than half a century later, I still have trouble wrapping my head around: however large an infinite set I named, someone else could name one infinitely larger. I do not remember the rest of that day, except that it passed in no time at all. My father filled my childhood with lessons, but never one larger than this: there are books that take you to places that never end. My sons and daughters might have read, from my own sagging shelves, books by several other writers who credit Gamow’s little book with starting their own careers. But I never had children, and my every house filled up each afternoon with an orchestra of instruments never practiced. My father died at fifty-two, of cancer and drink, having outlived much of his life’s best music. As I write this, I’m eight years older than he ever was. Last year, I began teaching myself to play piano. No matter how much longer I live, there will be an infinite number of pieces I’ll never play or even listen to.

tree under which they stood was entirely too small for the both of them, and that he should put himself beneath another. Captain von Bürger, who was a placid and humble man, really did put himself beneath another tree, whereupon Brietz was immediately struck by lightning and killed. 2. Bach, when his wife died, had to make arrangements for the funeral. But the poor man was so used to her taking care of everything that when an old servant came and asked him for money to buy mourning crepe, the composer, behind silent tears, head propped on his desk, replied, “Ask my wife.” 3. Two famous English boxers, one a native of Portsmouth, the other of Plymouth, who for many years had heard about but never seen each other, resolved, when they finally met in London, to hold a public bout to decide which of them deserved the glorious title of champion. So, with clenched fists, among a crowd gathered in a tavern garden, they took their stand against each other; and when the Plymouther, in nothing flat, struck the Portsmouther in the chest with such force that he spat blood, the latter, wiping his mouth, cried out: “Splendid!” But soon thereafter, once they had squared off again, the Portsmouther dealt the Plymouther such a powerful right hand to the gut that his

[Vocabulary]

APOCALYPSE NOUNS [Gossip]

From words that describe environmental phenomena that have entered colloquial usage since the Fifties, identified by the writer Isaac Pearlman.

LATE EDITION By Heinrich von Kleist, from Anecdotes, a collection of vignettes that originally appeared in Kleist’s newspaper Berliner Abendblätter, which began publication in 1810. Kleist took his own life the following year. The collection will be published next month by Sublunary Editions. Translated from the German by Matthew Spencer. 1. Brietz, a laborer, said to Captain von Bürger, of the former Tauentzien Regiment, that the

The Blob Drunken forest Firenado Earthshine Hotumn Cold stunning Relic permafrost Polar vortex Snowmageddon Bomb cyclone Global weirding

READINGS

eyes rolled back and he sank to the ground, shouting: “Not so bad yourself!” Whereupon the crowd, standing around them in a circle, cried out in jubilation, and they awarded the Portsmouther—while the Plymouther was carried away, dead from intestinal wounds—the title of champion. The Portsmouther too, however, was said to have died the following day, of a severe hemorrhage. 4. A Capuchin monk, one very rainy day, accompanied a Swabian prisoner to the gallows. Many times, the condemned man lamented to heaven that he, in such terrible and unfriendly weather, had to walk so bitter a path. The Capuchin wished to give him Christian comfort and replied: “You scoundrel! How can you complain? You only have to go there, but I, in all this rain, must come back the same way!”

judged! The incident (let the scribes explain it) is verified; the tombstone still exists, and there are men in this city who have seen it.

[Portraiture]

ABOUT FACE From “Stories to Black-and-White Sketches by Alex Katz,” written by Alexander Kluge in response to drawings by the artist Alex Katz. Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole and Wieland Hoban.

the foam-born 5. In Poland there once lived a countess, a lady of advanced years, who led a very wicked life and was, through her avarice and cruelty, a torment to others, especially her subordinates, bleeding them dry. This lady, when she died, bequeathed her fortune to a monastery for the absolution of her soul, the monastery erecting in its own churchyard a sumptuous tombstone of cast bronze on which, with much ado, her generosity was commemorated. The next day lightning struck and melted away the bronze, leaving nothing but a quantity of letters that, when read together, proclaimed the following: she is

[Bribe]

FAUCIAN BARGAIN From vaccination incentives offered by governments and businesses around the world this year. $1.5 million A $1.4 million apartment Gold bars A Tesla Model 3 sedan A vacation to Palm Springs Yankees tickets Six Flags tickets Two laps around the Talladega Superspeedway A custom hunting rifle Dinner with the governor of New Jersey

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

The water’s edge on the coast of Cyprus consists of organic matter and “salt water shaken in a special way.” No human is capable of stirring up water from the Tethys Ocean (which already ceased to exist in antiquity, and only lives on as the eastern basin of the Mediterranean) sufficiently to produce the foam from which cypris formed. This is all assuming that a goddess can take a specific form, rather than a creature in all forms. The epithets of the great goddess are well known. But there is no star sign in which she reveals herself. The majority of stories told about her are implausible. For instance, her marriage to the weaponsmith Vulcan, who dwells inside Mount Etna, her visits to the underworld, the mendacious and indeed Drawings by Alex Katz, from the series Beauty Portfolio, 2017–19 © The artist/VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York City

propagandistic story of how she paired off the sister of Clytemnestra, Helen of Mycenae, with Prince Paris of Troy. She would not have needed to be “foam-born” to do this; she could also have descended from land animals or sea monsters. Gods come into being like original life, from the edges of happy islands, in lagoons where the waters gain time, or from the great force with which the waves crash against rocks or beaches over hundreds of years. beauty is flawless

In the sense of regularity? There’s nothing regular about it. So it’s complicated? It’s not that either; it’s autonomous. In the sense of rebellious? Not toward my equations. A young physicist who was attending for the first time would not have wanted to miss the moments he shared with the enchanting scholar over a cup of tea after her lecture. The goddess remained unattainable to him—not only because she was married and had no interest in adventures in the middle of the Pacific. Rather, this untouchable character seemed to the young man like a prerequisite for beauty. And how could he have installed the beauty in his laboratory or his bachelor’s quarters anyway? Only if she had been a statue. he has the heartless eyes of one loved above all else

The beautiful Greek woman from the Waterloo Institute fascinated the physics community at the well-attended annual conference in Hawaii. Her head was wreathed in thick black hair. The tall figure strode up to the blackboard behind the lectern. With firm, screeching chalk strokes, she elaborated equations that connected the infinitely small and temporally short with the cosmically large (e.g., a protogalactic group, located in the constellation Coma Berenices, that had once spread out only three hundred thousand years away from the beginning of the world). One equation followed another with no complications. The majority of those in the hall considered both this woman and the formulae she was writing down beautiful. But the Greeks reserved the word “beauty” for the cosmos and the world of nanospheres. Her lecture proceeded from the axiom that the beauty and simplicity of equations, when they referred to such extremely disparate realities, indicate their coherence. Do you speak of “beauty” or “splendor” when you refer to the long-expired galactic group? Beauty.

I’ve just returned from comforting my best friend, Gesine. In the meantime, I’m sure she won’t kill herself. The storm has not been weathered. I saw how he trashed her, then slammed the apartment door behind him. He has the delicacy to continue living with her to avoid hotel costs. He leaves her apartment and goes about his business, visiting his new mistress, a married woman for whom Gesine has been demoted. I have to take care that my words of comfort (although I usually just gather her in my arms and put her to bed) don’t fuel her hopes of his returning to her in some fantastic shape. I saw the look in his eyes. Gesine doesn’t stand a chance. No one in the world

READINGS

can get something from him if he doesn’t want it. And he’s satiated, nourished by the devotion of women whose tribute he has been used to since childhood. Strictly speaking, it’s not his eyes that document his mercilessness but his look. His eyes, on the whole, are expressionless, a bit dull. Precisely this lack of expression gives his look an unnerving “negative” quality. What Gesine ever saw in this spoiled youth is a mystery to me. Even in that first courting hour—I was there but unfortunately went home early—he was full and satiated, his look a “business” look. So I was convinced that “I didn’t even need to ignore it.” But Ge-

sine saw something else. In his blotchy face she saw what she felt, as in a mirror. I always thought that mothers who loved their sons sow a seed of tenderness in them, which is then harvested by the people who meet these young men later. Instead, a frugal patriarchy establishes itself in such cases, a long line of sedentary ancestors who grasp only, and ask for nothing. I get the impression that sons who don’t have to fight for their mother’s affection develop monsters inside them. I don’t want to generalize, and yet I’m doing just that. My anger at Gesine’s occupier loosens my tongue: “He has the heartless eyes / Of one loved above all else.”

[Poem]

IMMIGRANT SEA By Forrest Gander, from Twice Alive, a poetry collection, which was published in May by New Directions. Aroused by her inaccessibility, he aches for more of her life to live inside him. Watching the breakers, standing so close he can feel heat coming off her wet scalp. What is his relation to this person before him, so familiar and foreign? The way he searches out her face, he searches out himself. Gusts thrash crests of swell, spring grasses twirl circles in the sand where they stand without speaking. She wants him to know it’s all charged, even grass positive, pollen negative, so when grass waves, it sweeps the air for pollen. He feels electricity all around as though the wild drama of the coming storm were already aware of them, foreigners on this shore. Little sapphire-blue flowers speckle the dunes. He wonders if he has let himself flatten out into a depthless sheet, like escalator stairs, whether in the end he’ll disappear underground without the smallest lurch of resistance. But when her lavish face turns toward him beaming, the corners of her eyes wind-wet, he yields to that excess, he reappears to himself.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

“San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 1971,” a photograph by Joel Meyerowitz from his monograph Wild Flowers, which was reissued this year by Damiani. Meyerowitz’s work is currently on view at the Musée d’art et d’archéologie, in Aurillac, France.

[Defense]

FAN MAIL

cock removed. He is a joy to all around him save for one miserable, joyless woman. I hereby advocate for the removal of this nuisance of a woman from our community.

From emails sent to the City of Oakland last year about a wild peacock living in a North Oakland neighborhood. The records were obtained by Adrien Salzberg at MuckRock.

Longtime neighborhood resident. Prefer to displace the complainant.

I’ve heard that there was a petition started by a recent transplant to have Animal Control remove a much-loved peacock from our neighborhood. I am absolutely disgusted and would like to voice my strong opposition. It’s magical to see him sitting in trees or on rooftops during walks, and he has long been a source of joyful discussion between neighbors. I am writing this letter in support of allowing Abraham, the Occidental Street peacock, to remain where he is. Moving him from his chosen spot could present a danger and even death. I have offered to buy the disturbed neighbor a white-noise machine. It has come to my attention that there is a oneperson effort to have the neighborhood pea-

I love Peter/Bruce! Please do not take him away. I get a ton of pleasure hearing him vocalize. I look forward to it every night. He is loved so much by so many that he has different names. People don’t name birds they don’t like. A week ago, I followed the sound of a unique birdcall and stumbled on a majestic king of a bird. He was up in the tree and the moon was in vision—it was such a beautiful sight! I felt blessed to be in his presence. Given the chaos we are experiencing in the world, to have a precious creature nearby is healing. There are a lot more important things going on than a petition to remove a peacock from Occidental Street. That’s why I’m writing. We are feeling collective grief, fear, and isolation-fatigue.

READINGS

“Mercator Höfe, Berlin,” a photograph by Romeo Alaeff, from the monograph In der Fremde: Pictures from Home, which was published in January by Hatje Cantz.

Abraham/Bruce/Peter’s occasional callout gives us a needed sense of community.

too quickly could kill him. Please explain what the plan is; I’ll fight his capture to the death.

I hope we can tolerate the occasional noise of the animal kingdom given that we humans are the biggest noisemakers of all—from planes to cars, motorcycles to fireworks, and even gunshots!

Please don’t force out a resident of our neighborhood. Oakland should be about inclusion.

My family has lived in the neighborhood for almost seventy years! Over the years, we have lived among the following: a scurry of squirrels, a gaze of raccoons, flocks of turkeys, a murder of crows, a passel of possums. And now a beautiful peacock who is vocally active during the mating cycle. The peacock, whom I call Junebug, brings a unique joy to the neighborhood. Schools are closed, the zoo is closed, museums are closed. Please leave the children (and the adults) this one exciting and beautiful creature. Don’t even think about moving this bird. A bird like him has a six-block radius, and moving him

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

[Fiction]

MOMENTS OF SILENCE By Vince Passaro, from Crazy Sorrow, a novel, which will be published this month by Simon and Schuster.

all passed to winter passed to early spring. All of it mild—God’s little favor. Arthur was getting an award from the Press Photography Association for photographs taken on September 11, 2001, and in the days

after. He had invited George and asked their of these things, put it in a double baggie, and friend Louis to introduce him, an odd choice. sent it back with the camera. Louis was not a member of the Society of He reached into his pocket and held up the Professional Photographers but he was a cesmall bag, holding about a cigarette’s width of lebrity playwright now. George bought a tapale gray dust and darker particles. ble and filled it with various eager souls from Here, he said. For the reliquary. The EPA isn’t his company. going to be saving any, I assure you. Anyway, no At the podium Louis said, I met Arthur plain image can evoke all of what it felt like, all when I was writing for the college paper. He of what happened there. The sound of bodies had a funny habit back then, he’d hand you a hitting the pavement. The enormous roar. Enorpile of seven or eight work prints and he would mous. It felt bigger than the air. After the South never put the best ones first. It was a test. He Tower fell, I kept imagining the sounds of thouwanted to know if you knew what you were sands of people screaming: it was as if I could hear doing with a picture. Arthur is an artist, and I it. And after that it never let up. A tinnitus of don’t think he has spent many moments on horror. This is what the mind does; no photothis earth not being an artist. You can see the graph can do that for you. Only the human determination the second you meet him. And imagination, stirred by the facts. I kept working, the lunacy. I did. And now you can! Ladies kept shooting, because if I hadn’t, I’d have gone and gentlemen, I give you Arthur Townes. insane. All that death. In certain places they They applauded. Some stood, not all. Arthur have to deal with that scale of death not once in was not that popular. He was a pain in the ass, a lifetime, as we hope is true for us, but every day and he hadn’t always done the right things to or every week. That our country is often the have a good career. cause of such death should make us weep. Standing before them, Arthur was clearly He paused. There was no applause for this. uncomfortable, too aware of his body. He Anyway, he said. Then the second tower hand-checked his jacket, shirt, bow tie. The came down. I had to move north, uptown. Away applause settled. He said thank you. Then: Photographs are not memory, John Berger said. He said that photographs have begun to replace memory. He was responding to [Technology] Sontag who was getting at something similar in a much more complicated way, which of course, right, it being Sontag. Photographs From design images for The Third Eye, a robotic eye developed replaced memory. But I think they by Min-Wook Paeng, an industrial designer and student at the started as part of memory, an Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The eye beeps assistance—memory wants time to to alert people of obstacles while they are walking and looking at stop but can’t make it stop, it’s a their phones. constant struggle, and then we had pictures. We all have a few frozen images in our minds of that day, September 11. Someone says 9/11, and if you didn’t lose anyone that day, what comes to mind is one of these images. Some of those images are ones I made, and I’m grateful for that, grateful I was alive and could be there. And that my Nikon kept working in all that dust, thank you, Nikon. Some scattered applause in the house. Pronounced nee-kohn in Japanese, by the way. I sent the camera and two lenses off to Nikon for repair and cleaning afterward, and at my request they took all the dust that came out

LIFE ALERT

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from it, we all did. The air was poisonous and thick. We still don’t know, right? I’m sure the bureaucrats will never tell us what was in the air. But the police and firefighters and EMS people kept going south. I didn’t see one hang back, and I was looking. I wanted to see that. I took a lot of pictures of them. They looked like World War I soldiers in the misty French woods. Like “Dulce et decorum est,” right? What could they do? But they went. As we all know, these people are not saints. But they went. And whoever could come, came. For days, for weeks, toxins and soot, whoever could help, helped.

[Discovery]

THE 500-YEAR-OLD STURGEON From “Fish in a barrel: Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus) from the Baltic Sea wreck of the royal Danish flagship Gribshunden (1495),” by Stella Macheridis et al., which appeared in the October issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. In 1495, the royal Danish ship Gribshunden sank in the Baltic Sea, near the town of Ronneby. The wreck was rediscovered by sport divers in the 1970s, and it has since been the subject of increasing scientific interest. The ship’s structure and materials have remained exceptionally well preserved because of the anoxic sediments and cool, low-salinity water of the Baltic Sea. In 2019, a dedicated interdisciplinary scientific excavation of a section of the wreck site revealed, among other things, the presence of intact wooden barrels, one of which contained numerous well preserved organic remains later identified as sturgeon. Finding almost complete remains of at least one ancient sturgeon individual in an archaeological deposit is unusual. Only occasionally have scattered and fragmented sturgeon remains previously been retrieved. A total of 129 fragments of animal remains were found in the barrel. Of these, 118 were sturgeon. Our analysis showed that all anatomical regions of the sturgeon body were represented; the sturgeon was relatively well preserved, albeit butchered. We have come to the conclusion that there was only one sturgeon in the barrel.

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Here the applause started. The ironworkers, he said. Huge men. They came in and the soles of their boots were melting, every day. I kid you not. I never stayed on the pile long enough for it to happen to me, but I could feel the heat. Every time a body or a part of a body was found, the whistles blew and everyone stopped. Hundreds of guys stopped. Waiting. Hats off. More applause. I have pictures, I can tell you. Standing still until they carried the body out. So that’s my city. No matter what, I will always love it. Here they stood up. Applauding. He thanked them. Then he asked them for five minutes of silence. Five minutes, he said. Not one short minute but five full ones. It’s going to be very uncomfortable, I’m warning you. I’ll stand here and keep time. Yes. Five minutes in a public place is an immense amount of time, but this was immense. That’s actually all I’m trying to say, it was really frigging immense. I’m not asking anyone to pray, but close your eyes, let your minds wander. Okay. Five minutes. Starting now. A hundred clinks of silverware being put down on plates. Then silence. It went on forever. It was painful. People were writhing, or so it felt to George, who kept his head down at first, then lifted it and looked around. Arthur’s head was down, too, but George saw the watch on the podium. His head down, he kept a slitted eye on the room and the time. Louis was right; he was an artist, and he wanted to take them beyond where they’d willingly go. He was controlling the moment with a Casio watch. Down to two minutes. Coughing, of course, every few seconds, then none, then it would start again. A number of the men had begun checking their expensive watches before the three-minute mark, and more of them after, as they approached four. George saw them. He also saw bodies, body after body after body, plummeting like heavy sacks through the air, and he imagined the sound. A hard thump with a bit of squish like a mark of punctuation. Awful. Every time he saw this in his mind’s eye, he felt something break. Four and a half minutes. He wanted to shout out to the squirming room that it was almost over. Then finally it was. That was very hard, Arthur finally said. Thank you. He waved oddly, like Nixon, George thought, and went back to his seat. They all rose. It embarrassed Arthur; he looked as if he wished they hadn’t and that he were anywhere else. So he rose too and clapped back at them. When he sat again, they all sat, too.

Reflection in the Looking-Glass River, a painting by Raqib Shaw, whose work was on view last month at Pace Gallery, in Geneva.

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BAD NEWS

Selling the story of disinformation By Joseph Bernstein

n the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world.

Joseph Bernstein is a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News and a 2021 Nieman Fellow.

Illustrations by Dan Bejar

And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read,

elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all. But our man lived in an Eden, not because it was unspoiled, but because he hadn’t considered any other state of affairs. For him, information was in its right— that is to say, unquestioned—place. And that was good, too.

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Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphor— “the information ecosystem”—which suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections. She looks out at her fellow citizens and sees them as contaminated, like tufted coastal animals after an oil spill, with “disinformation” and “misinformation.” She can’t quite define these terms, but she feels that they define the world, online and, increasingly, off. Everyone scrounges this wasteland for tainted morsels of content, and it’s impossible to know exactly what anyone else has found, in what condition, and in what order. Nevertheless, our American is sure that what her fellow citizens are reading and watching is bad. According to a 2019 Pew survey, half of Americans think that “made-up news/info” is “a very big problem in the country today,” about on par with the “U.S. political system,” the “gap between rich and poor,” and “violent crime.” But she is most worried about disinformation, because it seems so new, and because so new, so isolable, and because so isolable, so fixable. It has something to do, she knows, with the algorithm. What is to be done with all the bad content? In March, the Aspen Institute announced that it would convene an exquisitely nonpartisan Commission on Information Disorder, cochaired by Katie Couric, which would “deliver recommendations for how the country can respond to this modern-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

day crisis of faith in key institutions.” The fifteen commissioners include Yasmin Green, the director of research and development for Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google that “explores threats to open societies”; Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Kremlin critic; Alex Stamos, formerly Facebook’s chief security officer and now the director of the Stanford Internet

Observatory; Kathryn Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s estranged daughter-in-law; and Prince Harry, Prince Charles’s estranged son. Among the commission’s goals is to determine “how government, private industry, and civil society can work together . . . to engage disaffected populations who have lost faith in evidence-based reality,” faith being a well-known prerequisite for evidence-based reality. The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread

of various sorts of “toxicity” on socialmedia platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it. As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch? Big Disinfo has found energetic support from the highest echelons of the American political center, which has been warning of an existential content crisis more or less constantly since the 2016 election. To take only the most recent example: in May, Hillary Clinton told the former Tory leader Lord Hague that “there must be a reckoning by the tech companies for the role that they play in undermining the information ecosystem that is absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy.” Somewhat surprisingly, Big Tech agrees. Compared with other, more literally toxic corporate giants, those in the tech industry have been rather quick to concede the role they played in corrupting the allegedly pure stream of American reality. Only five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said. “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.” A year later, suddenly chastened, he apologized for being glib and pledged to do his part to thwart those who “spread misinformation.” Denial was always untenable, for Zuckerberg in particular. The so-called

techlash, a season of belatedly brutal media coverage and political pressure in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s win, made it difficult. But Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its content? Ironically, it turned out that the big social-media platforms shared a foundational premise with their strongest critics in the disinformation field: that platforms have a unique power to influence users, in profound and measurable ways. Over the past five years, these critics helped shatter Silicon Valley’s myth of civic benevolence, while burnishing its image as the ultra-rational overseer of a consumerist future. Behold, the platforms and their most prominent critics both proclaim: hundreds of millions of Americans in an endless grid, ready for manipulation, ready for activation. Want to change an output— say, an insurrection, or a culture of vaccine skepticism? Change your input. Want to solve the “crisis of faith in key institutions” and the “loss of faith in evidence-based reality”? Adopt a better content-moderation policy. The fix, you see, has something to do with the algorithm.

n the run-up to the 1952 presidential election, a group of Republican donors were concerned about Dwight Eisenhower’s wooden public image. They turned to a Madison Avenue ad firm, Ted Bates, to create commercials for the exciting new device that was suddenly in millions of households. In Eisenhower Answers America, the first series of political spots in television history, a strenuously grinning Ike gave pithy answers to questions about the IRS, the Korean War, and the national debt. The ads marked the beginning of mass marketing in American politics. They also introduced adindustry logic into the American political imagination: the idea that the right combination of images and words, presented in the right format, can predictably persuade people to act, or not act.

This mechanistic view of humanity was not without its skeptics. “The psychological premise of human manipulability,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.” To her point, Eisenhower, who carried 442 electoral votes in 1952, would have likely won even if he hadn’t spent a dime on TV. What was needed to quell doubts about the efficacy of advertising among people who buy ads was empirical proof, or at least the appearance thereof. Modern political persuasion, the sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote in his landmark 1962 study of propaganda, is defined by

BIG DISINFO HAS FOUND ENERGETIC SUPPORT FROM THE HIGHEST ECHELONS OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CENTER

its aspirations to scientific rigor, “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.” Customers seek persuasion that audiences have been persuaded. Luckily for the aspiring Cold War propagandist, the American ad industry had polished up a pitch. It had spent the first half of the century trying to substantiate its worth through association with the burgeoning fields of scientific management and laboratory psychology. Cultivating behavioral scientists and appropriating their jargon, writes the economist Zoe Sherman, allowed ad sellers to offer “a veneer of scientific certainty” to the art of persuasion: They asserted that audiences, like the workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.

The profitable relationship between the ad industry and the soft sciences took on a dark cast in 1957, when the journalist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, his exposé of “motivation research”—then the bleeding edge of collaboration be-

tween Madison Avenue and research psychology. The alarming public image Packard’s bestseller created—ad men wielding some unholy concoction of Pavlov and Freud to manipulate the Amer ic a n public i nto buyi ng toothpaste —is still with us today. And the idea of the manipulability of the public is, as Arendt noted, an indispensable part of the product. Advertising is targeted at consumers, but sold to businesses. Packard’s reporting was based on what motivation researchers told him. Among their own motivations, hardly hidden, was a desire to appear clairvoyant. In a late chapter, Packard admits as much: Some of the researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves—or in a sense to exploit the exploiters. John Dollard, [a] Yale psychologist doing consulting work for industry, chided some of his colleagues by saying that those who promise advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence are well received.”

Today, an even greater aura of omnipotence surrounds the digital ad maker than did his print and broadcast forebears. According to Tim Hwang, a lawyer who formerly led public policy at Google, this image is maintained by two “pillars of faith”: that digital ads are both more measurable and more effective than other forms of commercial persuasion. The asset that structures digital advertising is attention. But, Hwang argues in his 2020 book Subprime Attention Crisis, attention is harder to standardize, and thus worth much less as a commodity, than the people buying it seem to think. An “illusion of greater transparency” offered to ad buyers hides a “deeply opaque” marketplace, automated and packaged in unseen ways and dominated by two grimly secretive companies, Facebook and Google, with every interest in making attention seem as uniform as possible. This is perhaps the deepest criticism one can make of these Silicon Valley giants: not that their gleaming industrial information process creates nasty runoff, but that nothing all that valuable is coming out of the factory in the first place. Look closer and it’s clear that much of the attention for sale on the

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internet is haphazard, unmeasurable, or simply fraudulent. Hwang points out that despite being exposed to an enormous amount of online advertising, the public is largely apathetic toward it. More than that, online ads tend to produce clicks among people who are already loyal customers. This is, as Hwang puts it, “an expensive way of attracting users who would have purchased anyway.” Mistaking correlation for causation has given ad buyers a wildly exaggerated sense of their ability to persuade. So too has the all-important consumer data on which targeted advertising is based, and which research has exposed as frequently shoddy or overstated. In recently unsealed court documents, Facebook managers disparaged the quality of their own ad targeting for just this reason. An internal Facebook email suggests that COO Sheryl Sandberg knew for years that the company was overstating the reach of its ads. Why, then, do buyers love digital advertising so much? In many cases, Hwang concludes, it’s simply because it looks good at a meeting, blown up on an analytics dashboard: “It makes for great theater.” In other words, the digital-advertising industry relies on our perception of its ability to persuade as much as on any measurement of its ability to actually do so. This is a matter of public relations, of storytelling. And here, the disinformation frame has been a great asset.

he myths of the digitaladvertising industry have played a defining role in the way the critics of Big Tech tell the story of political persuasion. That’s because paid political content is the kind of digital mis- and disinformation with the highest profile—the nefarious influence that liberal observers across the West blamed for Brexit and Trump. Like any really compelling narrative, this one has good guys and bad guys. The heroes in the disinformation drama are people like Christopher Wylie, who blew the whistle on the black magic of Cambridge Analytica, then asked the world to buy his book. The villains are people like Brad Parscale, the flamboyant strategist who, at six feet eight inches,

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

could not have hidden himself from the press even if he wanted to, which he absolutely did not. The digital director of Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, Parscale was bumped up to campaign manager for the reelection bid. Sensing that this idiosyncratically bearded man was the secret architect of Trump’s supposed digital dominance, the press turned him into a Sith Lord of right-wing persuasion, a master of the misinformation force. A March 2020 New Yorker profile of Parscale touted him as “the man behind Trump’s Facebook juggernaut,” who had “used social media to sway the 2016 election” and was

MISTAKING CORRELATION FOR CAUSATION HAS GIVEN AD BUYERS A WILDLY EXAGGERATED SENSE OF THEIR ABILITY TO PERSUADE

“poised to do it again.” Parscale played the role with kayfabian glee, tweeting in May: For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time.

Barely two months later, ahead of criticism that Parscale didn’t know how to handle the offline elements of a campaign, Trump demoted him. Two months after that, police officers detained the great manipulator, shirtless and bloated, outside his South Florida mansion, where he had loaded a pistol during an argument with his wife. After an involuntary hospitalization, he resigned from the campaign, citing “overwhelming stress.” (He has since started a new digital political consultancy.) The media narrative of sinister digital mind control has obscured a body of research that is skeptical about the effects of political advertising and disinformation. A 2019 examination of thousands of Facebook users by political scientists at Princeton and NYU found that

“sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity”— more than 90 percent of users had never shared any. A 2017 Stanford and NYU study concluded that if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point. This is much smaller than Trump’s margin of victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended.

Not that these studies should be taken as definitive proof of anything. Despite its prominence in the media, the study of disinformation is still in the process of answering definitional questions and hasn’t begun to reckon with some basic epistemological issues. The most comprehensive survey of the field to date, a 2018 scientific literature review titled “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation,” reveals some gobsmacking deficits. The authors fault disinformation research for failing to explain why opinions change; lacking solid data on the prevalence and reach of disinformation; and declining to establish common definitions for the most important terms in the field, including disinformation, misinformation, online propaganda, hyperpartisan news, fake news, clickbait, rumors, and conspiracy theories. The sense prevails that no two people who research disinformation are talking about quite the same thing. This will ring true to anyone who follows the current media discussion around online propaganda. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” are used casually and interchangeably to refer to an enormous range of content, ranging from well-worn scams to viral news aggregation; from foreign-intelligence operations to trolling; from opposition research to harassment. In their crudest use, the terms are simply jargon for “things I disagree with.” Attempts to define “disinformation” broadly enough as to rinse it of political perspective or ideology leave us in territory so abstract as to be absurd. As the literature review put it:

“Disinformation” is intended to be a broad category describing the types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world.

That narrows it down! The term has always been political and belligerent. When dezinformatsiya appeared as an entry in the 1952 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, its meaning was ruthlessly ideological: “Dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion. The capitalist press and radio make wide use of dezinformatsiya.” Today, journalists, academics, and politicians still frame the disinformation issue in martial language, as a “war on truth” or “weaponized lies.” In the new context, however, bad information is a weapon wielded in an occasionally violent domestic political conflict rather than a cold war between superpowers. Because the standards of the new field of study are so murky, the popular understanding of the persuasive effects of bad information has become overly dependent on anecdata about “rabbit holes” that privilege the role of novel technology over social, cultural, economic, and political context. (There are echoes of Cold War brainwashing fears here.) These stories of persuasion are, like the story of online advertising, plagued by the difficulty of disentangling correlation from causation. Is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them? The latter possibility has embarrassing implications for the media and academia alike. An even more vexing issue for the disinformation field, though, is the supposedly objective stance media researchers and journalists take toward the information ecosystem to which they themselves belong. Somewhat amazingly, this attempt has taken place alongside an agonizing and overdue questioning within the media of the harm done by unexamined professional standards of objectivity. Like journalism, scholarship, and all other forms of knowledge creation, disinfor-

mation research reflects the culture, aspirations, and assumptions of its creators. A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, the New York Times, Stanford University, MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the

manufactured. Many disinformation workers, who spent months calling for social-media companies to ban such claims on the grounds that they were conspiracy theories, have been awkwardly silent as scientists have begun to admit that an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab is an unlikely, but plausible, possibility. Still, Big Disinfo can barely contain its desire to hand the power of disseminating knowledge back to a set of “objective” gatekeepers. In February, the tech news website Recode reported on a planned $65 million nonpartisan news initiative called the Project for Good Information. Its creator, Tara McGowan, is a veteran Democratic operative and the CEO of Acronym, a center-left digitaladvertising and voter-mobilization nonprofit whose PAC is funded by, among others, Steven Spielberg, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and the venture capitalist Michael Moritz. The former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, currently a strategist at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is an official Acronym adviser. Meanwhile, a February New York Times article humbly suggested the appointment of a “reality czar” who could “become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”

most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose, or hope to regain. Whatever the brilliance of the individual disinformation researchers and reporters, the nature of the project inevitably places them in a regrettably defensive position in the contemporary debate about media representation, objectivity, image-making, and public knowledge. However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality. This spring, in light of new reporting and a renewed, bipartisan political effort to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Facebook announced that it would no longer remove posts that claimed that the coronavirus was man-made or

he vision of a godlike scientist bestriding the media on behalf of the U.S. government is almost a century old. After the First World War, the academic study of propaganda was explicitly progressive and reformist, seeking to expose the role of powerful interests in shaping the news. Then, in the late 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation began sponsoring evangelists of a new discipline called communication research. The psychologists, political scientists, and consultants behind this movement touted their methodological sophistication and absolute political neutrality. They hawked Arendt’s “psychological premise of human manipulability” to government officials and businessmen, much as the early television ad executives had. They put themselves in the service of the state. The media scholar Jack Bratich has argued that the contemporary

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antidisinformation industry is part of a “war of restoration” fought by an American political center humbled by the economic and political crises of the past twenty years. Depoliticized civil society becomes, per Bratich, “the terrain for the restoration of authoritative truth-tellers” like, well, Harvard, the New York Times, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In this argument, the Establishment has turned its methods for discrediting the information of its geopolitical enemies against its own citizens. The Biden Administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism— the first of its kind—promises to “counter the polarization often fueled by disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous conspiracy theories online.” The full report warned not just of right-wing militias and incels, but anticapitalist, environmental, and animal-rights activists too. This comes as governments around the world have started using emergency “fake news” and “disinformation” laws to harass and arrest dissidents and reporters. One needn’t buy into Bratich’s story, however, to understand what tech companies and select media organizations all stand to gain from the Big Disinfo worldview. The content giants— Facebook, Twitter, Google—have tried for years to leverage the credibility and expertise of certain forms of journalism through fact-checking and media-literacy initiatives. In this context, the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations. Indeed, over the past few years, some journalists have started to grouse that their jobs now consist of fact-checking the very same social platforms that are vaporizing their industry. Ironically, to the extent that this work creates undue alarm about disinformation, it supports Facebook’s sales pitch. What could be more appealing to an advertiser, after all, than a machine that can persuade anyone of anything? This understanding benefits Facebook, which spreads more bad information, which creates more alarm. Legacy outlets with usefully prestigious brands are taken on board as trusted

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partners, to determine when the levels of contamination in the information ecosystem (from which they have magically detached themselves) get too high. For the old media institutions, it’s a bid for relevance, a form of selfpreservation. For the tech platforms, it’s a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions. A trusted disinformation field is, in this sense, a very useful thing for Mark Zuckerberg. And to what effect? Last year, Facebook started putting warning labels on Trump’s misinformative and disinformative posts. BuzzFeed News reported in November that the labels reduced sharing by only 8 percent. It was almost as if the vast majority of people who spread what Trump posted didn’t care whether a third party had rated his speech unreliable. (In fact, one wonders if, to a certain type of person, such a warning might even be an inducement to share.) Facebook could say that it had listened to critics, and what’s more, it could point to numbers indicating that it had cleaned up the information ecosystem by 8 percent. Its critics, having been listened to, could stand there with their hands in their pockets.

s the virus seized the world last year, a new, epidemiological metaphor for bad information suggested itself. Dis- and misinformation were no longer exogenous toxins but contagious organisms, producing persuasion upon exposure as inevitably as cough or fever. In a perfect inversion of the language of digital-media hype, “going viral” was now a bad thing. In October, Anne Applebaum proclaimed in The Atlantic that Trump was a “super-spreader of disinformation.” A study earlier that month by researchers at Cornell found that 38 percent of the English-language “misinformation conversation” around COVID-19 involved some mention of Trump, making him, per the New York Times, “the largest driver of the ‘infodemic.’” This finding resonated with earlier research suggesting that disinformation typically needs the support of political and media elites to spread widely. That is to say, the persuasiveness of information on social platforms depends on context. Propaganda

doesn’t show up out of nowhere, and it doesn’t all work the same way. Ellul wrote of the necessary role of what he called “pre-propaganda”: Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes. No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose.

Another way of thinking about prepropaganda is as the entire social, cultural, political, and historical context. In the United States, that context includes an idiosyncratic electoral process and a two-party system that has asymmetrically polarized toward a nativist, rhetorically anti-elite right wing. It also includes a libertarian social ethic, a “paranoid style,” an “indigenous American berserk,” a deeply irresponsible national broadcast media, disappearing local news, an entertainment industry that glorifies violence, a bloated military, massive income inequality, a history of brutal and intractable racism that has time and again shattered class consciousness, conspiratorial habits of mind, and themes of world-historical declension and redemption. The specific American situation was creating specific kinds of people long before the advent of tech platforms. To take the whole environment into view, or as much of it as we can, is to see how preposterously insufficient it is to blame these platforms for the sad extremities of our national life, up to and including the riot on January 6. And yet, given the technological determinism of the disinformation discourse, is it any surprise that attorneys for some of the Capitol rioters are planning legal defenses that blame social-media companies? Only certain types of people respond to certain types of propaganda in certain situations. The best reporting on QAnon, for example, has taken into account the conspiracy movement’s popularity among white evangelicals. The best reporting

about vaccine and mask skepticism has taken into account the mosaic of experiences that form the American attitude toward the expertise of public-health authorities. There is nothing magically persuasive about social-media platforms; they are a new and important part of the picture, but far from the whole thing. Facebook, however much Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg might wish us to think so, is not the unmoved mover. For anyone who has used Facebook recently, that should be obvious. Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial features no one cares about. And yet the people most alarmed about Facebook’s negative influence are those who complain the most about how bad a product Facebook is. The question is: Why do disinformation workers think they are the only ones who have noticed that Facebook stinks? Why should we suppose the rest of the world has been hypnotized by it? Why have we been so eager to accept Silicon Valley’s story about how easy we are to manipulate? Within the knowledge-making professions there are some sympathetic structural explanations. Social scientists get funding for research projects that might show up in the news. Think tanks want to study quantifiable policy problems. Journalists strive to expose powerful hypocrites and create “impact.” Indeed, the tech platforms are so inept and so easily caught violating their own rules about verboten information that a generation of ambitious reporters has found an inexhaustible vein of hypocrisy through stories about disinformation leading to moderation. As a matter of policy, it’s much easier to focus on an adjustable algorithm than entrenched social conditions. Yet professional incentives only go so far in explaining why the disinformation frame has become so dominant. Ellul dismissed a “common view of propaganda . . . that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people.” He compared this simplistic story to midcentury studies of advertising “which regard the buyer as vic-

tim and prey.” Instead, he wrote, the propagandist and the propagandee make propaganda together. One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age—what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it?—into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities. But there is a deeper and related reason many critics of Big Tech are so quick to accept the technologist’s story about human persuadability. As the political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has noted, the public relies on scientific and technological demonstrations of political cause and effect because they sustain our belief in the rationality of democratic government. Indeed, it’s possible that the Establishment needs the theater of socialmedia persuasion to build a political world that still makes sense, to explain Brexit and Trump and the loss of faith in the decaying institutions of the West. The ruptures that emerged across much of the democratic world five years ago called into question the basic assumptions of so many of the participants in this debate—the social-media executives, the scholars, the journalists, the think tankers, the pollsters. A common account of social media’s persuasive effects provides a convenient explanation for how so many people thought so wrongly at more or less the same time. More than that, it creates a world of persuasion that is legible and useful to capital—to advertisers, political consultants, media companies, and of course, to the tech platforms themselves. It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. Easy to explain, easy to tweak, and easy to sell, it is a worthy successor to the unified vision of American life produced by twentieth-century television. It is not, as Mark Zuckerberg said, “a crazy idea.” Especially if we all believe it. Q

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IN THE DARK By Aldous Huxley

ll over the world thousands upon thousands of men and women pass their whole lives denouncing, instructing, commanding, cajoling, imploring their fellows. With what results? One finds it rather hard to say. Most propagandists do their work in the dark, draw bows at a venture. They write; but they don’t know how far they will succeed in influencing their readers, nor what are the best means for influencing them, nor how long their influence will last. There is, as yet, no science of propaganda. This fact may seem the more surprising when we consider that there is something not far removed from a science of advertising. Advertisers claim to know accurately enough the potentialities and limitations of different kinds of propaganda—what you can do, for example, by mere statement and repetition; by appeals to such wellorganized sentiments as snobbery and the urge toward social conformity; by playing on the animal instincts such as greed, lust, and especially fear in all its forms, from the fear of sickness and death to the fear of being ugly or absurd to one’s fellows. If commercial propagandists know their business so well, why is it, then, that political propagandists should know theirs so badly? The answer is that the problems with which the advertisers have to deal are fundamentally unlike the problems that confront politicians and moralists—and political propagandists are also moralists; they

invite their readers to repress their cravings and set limits to their egotistical impulses for the sake of some political cause which is to bring happiness in the future. Others demand no personal effort from their readers, but do demand their adherence to a cause, whose success will save the world. The first has to persuade people to do something which is on the whole disagreeable. The second has to persuade

them of the correctness of a policy which, though it imposes no immediate discomforts, admittedly brings no immediate rewards.

nlike the advertisers, then, political and social propagandists are generally quite uncertain as to the kind of effects they will be able to produce upon their readers. Propagandists themselves seldom admit this fact. Like all the rest of us, they like to insist upon their own importance. Moreover, there has been a tendency among historians and political theorists to lend support to their claims. This is not surprising. As professional writers, historians and political theorists are naturally prone to exaggerate the significance of literature.

Rich men and politicians have a fixed belief that if they can control the press they can control public opinion. They buy up newspapers, partly in order to make money, but mainly in the confident hope of being able to persuade the electorate to do what they want it to do. But in fact, they fail just as often as they succeed. Propaganda by even the greatest masters of style is as much at the mercy of circumstance as propaganda by the worst journalists. Ruskin’s diatribes against machinery and the factory system influenced only those who were in an economic position similar to his own; on those who profited by machinery and the factory system they had no influence whatsoever. That is, propaganda is most influential when it is a rationalization of the desires, sentiments, prejudices, or interests of those to whom it is addressed. A theology or a political theory may be defined as an intellectual device for enabling people to do in cold blood things which, without the theology or the theory, they could do only in the heat of passion. The energy developed by the prevailing passions of the masses is given a direction and at the same time strengthened and made continuous. Sporadic outbursts of feeling are converted into purposive and unremitting activity. The theory may, of course, be completely absurd from a scientific point of view; but this is of no importance so long as men believe it to be true. Q

From “Notes on Propaganda,” which appeared in the December 1936 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 171-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

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WORLD OF NIGHT Photographs by Hale Gurland

On September 11, 2001, Hale Gurland, a helicopter pilot, multidisciplinary artist, and sculptor with expertise in welding, rushed to Ground Zero with his torches, tanks, and gauges. Working nights and sleeping days, Gurland aided in the searchand-rescue efforts, pausing occasionally to record images. Over the course of four days, Gurland exposed just five rolls of film.

Hale Gurland is an artist in New York City.

All photographs © Hale Gurland/Contact Press Images. Courtesy the artist

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WHEN THE RAIDS CAME The war’s toll on one Afghan family By Andrew Quilty

bdul Jalil Anees was born in the mid-Sixties in Sher Toghi, a village three hours from the nearest highway in central Afghanistan’s Wardak province. His father grew wheat, potatoes, and red apples Andrew Quilty is a photographer and reporter based in Kabul.

on the same land Abdul Jalil would later farm with his own sons. It was a period of relative peace and prosperity, the product of a Cold War struggle for influence that saw the United States and the USSR plying the impoverished country with massive infrastructure projects.

A memorial for the passengers of a car hit by a U.S. air strike in Chak district. All photographs from Wardak province, Afghanistan, by Andrew Quilty © The artist

In 1979, however, the Soviets invaded, installing a new leader and waging war against the Mujahedeen, a group of anticommunist guerrillas. A year later, after completing ninth grade in Wardak, Abdul Jalil followed his older brother into the Communist national military. “We had no interest

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in their ideology,” he says, but “they had uniforms and discipline, and, as a sixteen-year-old, I really liked that.” After seven years of training, he was deployed to the southern province of Kandahar, where he reached the rank of major. Abdul Jalil’s indifference toward Communist doctrine turned more hostile after his family was forced to redistribute portions of its land among Sher Toghi residents. He declined a scholarship to study in the USSR and began working against the regime from within. Many soldiers were indirectly helping the Mujahedeen at the time, he says: “We used to hand weapons over to the shops and the Mujahedeen would come to collect them.” Soon after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Abdul Jalil quit the army. After a decade, he was ready to return to the life he’d left behind. He surrendered to a Mujahedeen faction that he believes spared his life because of the weapons he provided. Back in Sher Toghi, he married Bibi Karima Ghiasi, who was also from Wardak. When his older brothers moved on, he took over the family home, caring for his elderly parents and tending their fields. The Mujahedeen reduced the capital city of Kabul to rubble during the civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1996, but their battles barely affected those living in the remote valleys of Wardak. Nor did much change in Sher Toghi when Kabul fell to a group—whose members described themselves simply as religious students, or taliban—that had risen up in Kandahar in response to the depredations of the marauding Mujahedeen. While they may have been given formal titles such as district governor or military commander, the local mullahs “were the same people we’d grown up with,” Abdul Jalil says. When changes did come, they were mostly superficial; men had to grow their beards and music was banned, but cultural traditions that contravened Taliban edicts were generally permitted locally. “The Taliban were not as strict in the villages as they were in the big cities,” he says. Women in Sher Toghi,

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for example, “could go to the fields, farm, and feed their animals, and the Taliban did not cause any trouble.”

n the evening of September 11, 2001, Abdul Jalil was at home listening for news of fallout from the assassination, two days before, of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Before long, reports of planes striking buildings in New York and Washington began to flood the Voice of America broadcast. In rural Wardak, the subsequent U.S. invasion and the crumbling of

“AT FIRST, WE THOUGHT HOW STRANGE THEY LOOKED. WE’D NEVER SEEN SUCH PEOPLE BEFORE”

the Taliban were as unremarkable as the group’s rise. American air strikes like those that targeted Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda fighters in the country’s east and south, and celebrations with music and dancing like those that took place in Kabul, were wholly absent from Day Mirdad, the district in southern Wardak in which Sher Toghi lies. Local Taliban officials shed their titles and “went back to civilian life,” recalls Abdul Jalil. “People adapted to the change.” The years under the Taliban had been peaceful in Wardak, but coming off the civil war and coinciding with a crippling drought, they had been a time to endure rather than thrive. “The Taliban regime was good,” says Abdul Jalil, “but the poverty levels were so high. So we were optimistic. Maybe, if the U.S. comes,” he remembers thinking, “our economy—work, job opportunities—will increase, and our lives will improve.” Fazelminallah Qazizai, a journalist from Wardak, was a child at the time, but he remembers how Wardakis saw heavy snowfalls as signs that better times were ahead. After several years of poor harvests, optimistic farmers thought the Taliban might have been responsible for their run of bad luck. Shuhrat Nangial, the author of more

than fifty books about Afghanistan, is also from Wardak. “Afghans have never approved of any foreign invaders,” he says, “but some impacts the Americans had since 2001 were welcomed.” Those effects, however, were felt primarily in the cities, where development dollars were invested in public services and security measures with which the new administration, staffed largely by senior figures from the Northern Alliance, was able to leverage support. In Wardak, the government presence was “not in a form that people respected,” Nangial says, because services were nonexistent. “The government didn’t care about the people in Wardak. They didn’t listen to their grievances.” Qazizai sees this as the first flaw of the post-2001 order in Afghanistan. He blames the United States’ empowerment of senior antiTaliban figures for laying the foundation for revolt. Afghan allies of the international forces cynically identified rivals as members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Those denounced were either killed or detained, and treated cruelly while being mined for intelligence they often didn’t possess. Qazizai cites stories that began to filter back to the families of detainees in Bagram and Guantánamo Bay—and even of unrelated detainees in Abu Ghraib, Iraq—“that fueled people, especially in Wardak, to take up weapons against the U.S.” Abdul Jalil’s first encounter with the Americans didn’t come until a year or two after their arrival, when a few a r mored vehicles rolled through Day Mirdad in a convoy with Afghan forces. “They never spoke to us face-to-face,” he says. “We’d just see them passing on the road.” The snaking convoys coming from Kabul would often stop on their way to the district center, but they never stayed for long. “At first, we thought how strange they looked,” says Abdul Jalil’s second eldest, Nasratullah. “We’d never seen such people before.” He recalls Wardakis’ attitude toward the Americans as curious, but wary: “When the convoys saw people on the road they’d stop and provide cakes and sweets.” Wardak’s proximity to the capital, Kabul, was also beginning to under-

score the growing urban-rural divide in Afghanistan. While the livelihoods of Wardakis who prospected for opportunities in Kabul often improved, those who stayed behind saw little change. Abdul Jalil first sensed what was fomenting in Day Mirdad when two members of a council of elders on which he served received letters from the Taliban warning them to stop collaborating with the government. “Slowly, slowly, insecurity grew,” he says. As the U.S. military shifted its focus to Iraq in the mid-Aughts, animosity toward the outsiders began to coalesce into coordinated revolt. Former Taliban fighters recovered weapons they’d abandoned in 2001 and reorganized into small units. Because the Americans had little permanent presence in rural Wardak, early insurgents adopted hit-and-run tactics against convoys on the Kabul– Kandahar highway. Meanwhile, more senior members began recruiting and establishing shadow administrations in various districts.

As the American footprint in Wardak increased—first in 2009, when as many as two thousand American soldiers were deployed to the province, and again in 2010, following Obama’s troop surge—so did the Taliban’s ability to recruit new and increasingly aggrieved fighters. By 2011, violence was surging. Taliban fighters downed a U.S. Chinook helicopter in Wardak, killing thirty Americans and eight Afghans in the deadliest incident for American forces in the entire war. The following month, fighters detonated a truck bomb outside a combat outpost, injuring seventy-seven coalition troops. U.S. forces countered with large-scale clearance operations, as well as night raids and air and artillery strikes. After a Green Beret team was accused of humanrights abuses in 2013, antipathy toward the Americans became so acute that then-president Hamid Karzai ordered all U.S. Special Forces out of the province. “At first, there was no support for the Taliban,” says Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander who currently

A group of men, likely Taliban fighters, in Tangi Saidan, Day Mirdad district

serves in Day Mirdad. “It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.”

ll the while, Abdul Jalil and Bibi Karima were raising their family. By 2014, they had eight children: four boys and four girls. The eldest two, Fawad and Nasratullah, who are now twenty-three and twenty-one, were close but combative. “Most of the time we were fighting,” Nasratullah says, laughing. “Just over little things: a ball, a bicycle. Whenever our father would bring something home, we’d fight over it.” They both attended Babak High School, to which they’d walk or ride bicycles. Fawad was a diligent student. Nasratullah wasn’t: “Most of the time, I was just looking for ways to leave. Sometimes I’d leave early and wait for the others to finish before going home. The family shouldn’t know that I was escaping from school.” His father was aware that Nasratullah had little interest

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in his studies, but he denies that his son was spending more time outside the classroom than in. “I used to go to the school to speak with the principal and teachers to make sure he was attending,” Abdul Jalil says. “My family were all well educated. We were very strict about education.” Accessible only by a bumpy dirt road, Day Mirdad was of little strategic importance and was virtually ceded to the Taliban by 2010. With government forces confining themselves to their compounds, Taliban fighters roamed freely. Abdul Jalil was concerned about Nasratullah, who was listless and impressionable. He had good reason to be worried. Nasratullah was in the fourth grade when he first saw Taliban fighters in Sher Toghi. “I was sitting in the mosque,” he says, “and we asked the mullah what they were doing. He told us they were doing jihad . . . and the stories left a big impression on me.” Fawad g r aduated f rom high school in 2017 and moved to Kabul to study at a private medical univer-

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sity. Nasratullah finished the following year. By then, his friends had begun to join the Taliban. Reluctantly, at his father’s urging, he started preparing for the university entrance exam while farming and helping contractors expand the home the family had purchased four years earlier. Not satisfied that he was doing enough to keep his second son occupied, Abdul Jalil says, he sent him away to Iran. Nasratullah casts the decision to go as his own, one made “for pleasure,” though he was encouraged by his family and friends. “We also thought we should work while we were there,” he says, referring to the two friends he traveled with, “because there was no work here.” Like hundreds of thousands of unemployed Afghan men each year, they traveled without passports or visas through the desert in southwestern Afghanistan before crossing into Pakistan, and then Iran. The economic boom in Afghanistan that had been fueled by foreign development aid foundered after international combat operations for-

mally ended in 2014. Unemployment soared almost immediately, helping to drive a mass exodus of young Afghans to Europe. In a 2019 A sia Fou ndation su r vey, only 36 percent of eighteen- to twentyfive-year-old Afghans reported earning an income. The paucity of job opportunities was a major source of dissatisfaction with the Afghan government, positions in which are earned more often through nepotism than merit. Although no figures exist on the number of Afghans crossing illegally into Iran in search of work, the International Organization for Migration counted more than 760,000 Afghans returning from Iran—voluntarily or otherwise— in 2018. Nangial says the Taliban capitalized on the population’s resentment toward the government and its urban constituents, as well as on grievances over U.S. and Afghan military abuses. “It’s not a war of belief in Afghanistan,” he says. “The people had expectations: better lifestyle, better living standards.” The government squandered its opportunity. “Nobody

The Taliban commander Mullah Omari and others perform evening prayers in a mosque in Sher Toghi, Day Mirdad district

wants a Taliban government there,” but faced with a choice between neglect and contempt from the government in Kabul, and the nominal respect they’re shown by Taliban fighters who live ascetically among them, most will reluctantly accept the locals. For his part, Abdul Jalil is loath to endorse anyone. “Honestly, we’re stuck in the middle . . . We’re not really happy with either side.”

n September 2018, as part of his strateg y to fight the thenseventeen-year-old war using “all instruments of American power— diplomatic, economic, and military,” Trump appointed the Afghan-born U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation. The first of several rounds of peace talks between Khalilzad and representatives of the Taliban commenced the next month in Doha, Qatar. By then, the military component in Trump’s strategy was already under way. In 2017, the Pentagon had relaxed its rules of engagement and escalated its air war. The following year, with

some fourteen thousand troops in Afghanistan, the United States dropped more munitions from its aircraft than it had in 2010, when troops numbered one hundred thousand. “The entire purpose behind our air campaign,” a U.S. Air Force general explained in June 2018, “is to pressure the Taliban into reconciliation and help them realize that peace talks are their best option.” In Wardak, the increase in violence wasn’t confined to air strikes. Stories of brutal night raids, carried out mostly by a CIA-trained and funded unit known as 01, with the support of American Special Operations Forces, CIA paramilitary officers, and U.S. air power, had been spreading through the province since late 2018. The victims were rarely insurgents, but rather civilian families living in areas under Taliban control, or students of madrassas as young as eight. Wardak residents and government officials interviewed in 2019 described 01’s raids—arguably the most deliberately ruthless since the war began—as a campaign of terror that claimed dozens of civilian lives. Patricia Gossman, an associate di-

A memorial for victims of a U.S. air strike near Sebak, in Chak district. According to a witness, the victims were two Hazara men and a businessman, none of whom were members of the Taliban.

rector for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch who documented the raids in a 2019 report, says that the Taliban is known to recruit from madrassas, and so their students may have been targeted because they were seen as potential future enemies. According to Nangial, the same guilt by association can attract raids against residents who have complied with requests by Taliban fighters for food or lodging.

aturday, February 23, 2019, dawned bright and blue in Sher Toghi after three days of snow that had ensured respite from the raids. Three weeks earlier, Fawad had returned for winter vacation from Kabul, where he was studying oral medicine. He spent the morning with friends in the village square and at the local mosque, a social hub during winter because it was kept warm day and night. When he returned home in the afternoon, he was greeted by a friend asking after Nasratullah, who was still working in Iran. The two drove to a grocery store and drank tea until they heard the muezzin’s call to the evening prayer.

LETTER FROM SHER TOGHI

It was dark by the time Fawad got home. His mother, five brothers and sisters, and a fifteen-year-old boy named Wahidullah who worked at the house were waiting for him and his father, who was attending a meeting with local elders, so they could eat dinner. By 9 pm, the whole family was asleep on long, flat cushions or folded blankets around the living room, warmed by a traditional wood-burning heating system. Wahidullah slept on his own in the kitchen. Fawad slept beneath a large window that framed a view over the single dirt road that runs through Day Mirdad and across the valley floor, where bare poplars and apple trees sprang from the snow. It was Bibi Karima who woke first. “Get up! It’s a night raid!” she shouted. When Fawad came to, he heard helicopters. Out the window he could see two double-rotor Chinooks landing in a field across from the house. Human figures, silhouetted against the snow, spilled from their loading ramps. Fawad looked at his phone. It was 10 pm. He told his father, the only other grown man in the house, to put on warm clothes. “Be ready,” he said. “Maybe they will search the house. If they do, they’ll take us outside, and it’s freezing.” In response, Abdul Jalil told Fawad to find his university ID and to keep it on him. “My brothers and sisters were screaming and crying,” Fawad says, “but I told them, ‘It’s a raid, yes, but it’s not on our house.’ ” Minutes passed, and the soldiers who had moved west through the field disappeared from view. The Chinooks lifted off and vanished into the night. The mood in the house eased even as intermittent gunfire and explosions continued near the center of the village. There, in another field adjacent to a small mosque where a group of around fifteen Taliban fighters was staying, two Chinooks were depositing more soldiers. One of Abdul Jalil’s nephews, Mohammad Omar, lived nearby. “Our clothes were drying outside and the helicopters blew them all off. That’s how low they were flying,” he says. His eightyear-old daughter clung to him, and implored him to hold her tighter so her heart wouldn’t stop.

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Occasionally, Fawad would peel back the blanket that insulated the window to try to glimpse what was happening. Although he rarely saw them, Fawad could hear jets, helicopters, and a lumbering AC-130, the most feared of all close-air-support aircraft in the American arsenal. Fawad joked with his fifteen-year-old brother Enayatullah that once the helicopters left he should go to the village, and “maybe you’ll find some shoes or equipment and things.” Even when the firefight died down, the roar of jets wavered through the valley. Around 3 am, Fawad recalls, “We were just up talking.” Outside, the landscape was lit up by flares that trailed smoke as they fell slowly to the ground. Then, Fawad says, he saw “a bright light. Then, bang!” A bomb hit an empty room on the other side of the house. The windows exploded. Fawad clutched at his right eye. “When I touched it,” he says, “I thought it might have come out.” It was dark inside: “We weren’t able to see each other—who got injured and how,” but Abdul Jalil managed to usher everyone toward the kitchen. Through the windows they saw dark figures and then muzzle flashes: soldiers opening fire from the perimeter wall. As they huddled on the floor with rounds bursting through the windows, another explosion, bigger than the first, shook the house. Abdul Jalil, his face bleeding, hurried his wife and children and Wahidullah into a small bathroom with a single window. Abdul Jalil spread a blanket over the family for warmth. Fawad sat on a water tank and raised his head to peer outside. The family yelled at him to get down. A moment later, bullets struck the window and the wall behind him. Then another explosion engulfed them. “My ears were ringing,” Fawad says, “but I could still hear the screams and the cries of my family.” He was unable to move, pinned beneath a crushing weight. Maybe I’m dead, he thought. “I took a deep breath and tasted dust.” With his one good eye, Fawad looked around. Splintered beams and broken slabs of mud had collapsed around him. “Then,” he says, “I looked up and saw the sky.”

Fawad pulled himself out of the rubble and freed Enayatullah so the two of them could work together to rescue the others. They pulled fourteen-yearold Zeinab out next. One of her legs was badly broken and burnt, as was her face. Next Fawad dragged his father free. His mother and sisters, eight-year-old Zeenat and six-year-old Fatima, were crying for help; they were alive. Abdul Jalil collapsed and appeared to be unconscious. “I started crying,” says Fawad, “but went back to working on the others.” Enayatullah told Fawad that he was going to find help. “Don’t go outside,” said Fawad. “Help me here, to rescue the

others.” He continued trying to pull debris away from where his mother and sisters were trapped. When he turned to check on Enayatullah, his brother was nowhere to be seen. “Suddenly, a helicopter crossed above us and fired,” says Fawad. “They’d shot my brother. There was nothing I could do.” His mother and two youngest sisters were still stuck. As Fawad tried to clear dirt from around his mother’s mouth so that she could breathe, soldiers appeared behind him, yelling in Pashto and Dari. As Fawad turned, he was shot in the knee, but barely recognized the pain at first. “I

Fawad

raised my hands and said the Kalima,” says Fawad. “I thought they were going to kill me.” One of the soldiers searched his pockets. “After they took out my university ID card, he said to the others, ‘Don’t kill him. Search the house.’ ” Fawad pleaded with the soldiers: “Please, forget searching the house. Look, my father is injured, and my two sisters and mother are under the fallen roof, they’re going to die.” Then they bound his hands. The soldiers picked up his tenyear-old brother, Rafiullah, who had suffered only minor injuries but was distraught, and dropped him on top

of Fawad, who was told to calm him down. Two soldiers crouched beside Abdul Jalil and began tending to his injuries. They were foreigners— Americans, suspected Fawad, Abdul Jalil, and Rafiullah. One bandaged Fawad’s head and knee. “The foreign soldiers were helping us,” says Rafiullah. “One foreign soldier touched my brother’s eye and shook his head in pity. The Afghan soldiers were shouting at us and walking on top of where my mom and sisters were stuck.” Another foreign soldier, a woman, was filming or taking photographs. At one point, Fawad says, she sat beside him and asked one of the

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other foreigners to take a photo of the two of them. Abdul Jalil, who had suffered broken ribs and shrapnel wounds, was drifting in and out of consciousness, but recalls hearing Fawad asking the soldiers to help his mother and sisters. “They could have, but they didn’t,” he says. “Until that moment, my two daughters, along with their mother, were alive and stuck in that small bathroom.”

bdul Jalil, Fawad, Zeinab, and Rafiullah were strapped to stretchers and carried out of the house, across the road, and into the field where the Chinooks had landed earlier. By the time more helicopters arrived, Fawad was so cold he couldn’t feel his legs. After around thirty minutes in the air, the four patients were transferred to waiting ambulances. It wasn’t until Fawad heard the driver mention Macroyan, a neighborhood in Kabul, that he knew where they were. They were driven to a large hospital in the center of the capital run by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, where they received preliminary treatment. Fawad could hear his father and Rafiullah nearby, and asked a nurse about Zeinab. When the nurse brought her to his bedside in a wheelchair, Fawad, whose face was swollen and speckled with shrapnel wounds, says, “She began to cry. She didn’t recognize me because of my injuries.”

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After two nights in the hospital, with Abdul Jalil in critical condition, the four patients were given new clothes and transferred again to an ambulance. The driver dropped them a few miles away by the entrance to the Intercontinental Hotel, bought them juice, and paid for another taxi to take them farther, offering Fawad the use of his phone before he departed. Fawad knew the number for his uncle, Gulam Jirani Bariulai, by heart. It was the first time anyone from the extended family had heard from them in days. Bariulai, a doctor who lives in Kabul, had received a call hours after the attack from his brother, Mohammad Omar, who was in Sher Toghi, and had driven there immediately. Cars lined both sides of the narrow road below the house, where an excavator was lifting away the rubble. The bodies of Bibi Karima, Zeenat, and Fatima had already been found and removed from the wreckage. Wahidullah, the young worker, was also dead. Enayatullah, who had run to get help, had been found first, on the road, one hundred yards from the house. His body had been torn apart by high-caliber rounds, likely from an attack helicopter. One arm had been completely severed. By this point, no one from the village knew whether Abdul Jalil and the missing children were alive or dead. Their phones were all switched off. Mohammad Omar, Abdul Jalil’s cousin, had

found his glasses in the ruined house. Graves were dug for the eight family members a nd for Wa hidulla h. Around midday, word spread about a call that had been received, possibly from the NDS hospital. The four missing family members were alive. Bariulai met the taxi in western Kabul. Aside from Rafiullah, he says, “Fawad was the only one who could walk.” Bariulai took Zeinab to a hospital that specialized in burns and Abdul Jalil to another hospital for scans and X-rays. Doctors there told Bariulai that Abdul Jalil would need to be taken to Pakistan for treatment. In an ambulance, Mohammad Omar and Bariulai nursed Fawad and Abdul Jalil, who was on oxygen, for five hours, until they reached the border, where they had arranged for another ambulance to meet them. A doctor at t he hospital had warned Bariulai: “If you stop oxygen for five minutes, he’ll die.” Abdul Jalil underwent surgery in Peshawar to repair a ruptured liver and other internal wounds. He returned to Kabul in May, three months after the attack. I spoke to him there soon after at the home of a relative. “We’re taking shelter here for now,” he told me. “There are still air strikes, so we will wait until it stops. Plus, our house is destroyed.” Nasratullah had been working for an engineering company laying a road in Esfahan for about a month when he

Left: Fawad cleans debris from the attack on his family’s home Right: Abdul Jalil displays the wounds he sustained during the air strike

received a message from a friend telling him there had been a night raid, and that one of his brothers had been killed. He called around and, after three days, believed that only his father and brother had been injured and were recovering in the hospital. Still, he was unable to reach anyone from his immediate family. “We didn’t want to tell him what had happened,” Fawad says. “We just wanted to tell him to come home.” Without enough money to pay for a flight to Kabul, Nasratullah waited more than two weeks to receive his salary, which still didn’t amount to enough for airfare. Knowing that undocumented Afghans were deported when the police caught them, he decided to turn himself in. He was taken to the border, near the city of Mashhad, and, with hundreds of other Afghan workers, walked into the Afghan province of Herat, where he boarded a bus to Kabul. Nasratullah had spoken to friends and family about the raid but didn’t know whose account to believe. He needed to see for himself. “When I reached the village and saw the house,” he says, “I thought it was a

dream. Everything was destroyed. There were no doors, no windows . . . I couldn’t control myself. I couldn’t even cry. . . . The only thing to do was to pray for those who were killed and for those who were injured.”

n the year after the February attack, 01 conducted dozens of similar night raids, striking homes occupied by families, mosques where a traveling salesman and a man with a severe mental disability slept, and madrassa dormitories full of young students who came from outlying areas of Wardak. I wrote about the campaign for The Intercept, documenting ten raids that resulted in fifty-one civilian deaths. No U.S. agency or department responded to detailed questions about them. On February 29, 2020, Khalilzad, the special envoy, pressured by Trump’s political timeline, signed an agreement with the Taliban that some hoped would pave a way out of the war. The agreement was accompanied by an immediate ceasefire between the United States and the Taliban. The night raids, which had slowed toward

Nasratullah leaves the cemetery where his mother and siblings are buried

the end of 2019, stopped almost entirely, although it was unclear to what extent the CIA was de-escalating in order to adhere to the deal. That May, an Afghan journalist with whom I had been working, and who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, met with a close mutual friend of a young but notorious Taliban commander named Mullah Qasim—Day Mirdad’s shadow governor at the time. The friend spoke about how life in Wardak had become peaceful after the signing of the Doha Agreement. Fawad, who was in Sher Toghi while his university was closed because of COVID-19, said at the time, “There’s no bombardments or night raids. People are happy; it’s like Eid. The Taliban are more relaxed, too.” The friend also told the journalist about a new recruit of Mullah Qasim. The recruit’s family, he said, had been targeted in one of the previous year’s night raids. His name was Nasratullah. A month later, in June 2020, I met Fawad for tea by a lake on the edge of Kabul. A year after we’d first met, his eye was mostly healed and he now wore a short beard. He spoke about his

LETTER FROM SHER TOGHI

family and of the relief people in Wardak had begun to feel since the night raids ceased. Under Taliban control, with no front line within fifty miles of Sher Toghi, life had returned to normal. When asked about young men joining the Taliban in response to the previous year’s spate of night raids, Fawad initially deflected, agreeing that recruitment had jumped in general, without acknowledging his own experience. Eventually, he relented. “Mullah Qasim was the district [shadow] governor at the time,” he said. “Nasratullah went directly to him.” Furthermore, Fawad confessed, he, too, had considered the path his brother had chosen. “I had the same decision to make as my brother,” he said. “When I see the government and NDS, I hate them.” Ultimately, Fawad decided against it. “One in my family is enough,” he said. “I can continue my studies and support the family.”

t the end of 2020, after five months of negotiating with Taliban representatives, I was granted permission to travel to Sher Toghi to meet Nasratullah

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

alongside an Afghan journalist (who out of concern for his safety asked to remain anonymous). Snow lined the highway as our taxi drove south from Kabul. Fawad came with us. Every couple of miles between Maidan Shar and the turnoff to Day Mirdad, the traffic slowed to swerve around craters left by Taliban mines. Once we were off the highway, beyond a handful of small mountaintop outposts of the Afghan National Army, it was often difficult to discern who was in control. The Taliban, whose fighters are mostly locals, doesn’t rely on the kind of infrastructure that government forces do. An occasional Taliban flag—white and emblazoned with the shahada—flapping above a mud-walled compound, or a cluster of fighters on motorcycles, their Kalashnikovs barely concealed by shawls (or displayed openly at temporary checkpoints), were all that indicated that the insurgents held sway. We traversed Gaw Kush, a remote mountain pass where Nasratullah and village elders had driven to welcome Fawad and their father when they returned after the attack. During the

approach to Sher Toghi, we passed macabre memorials to civilians and fighters killed during the same 2019 campaign: twisted remains of vehicles destroyed by air strikes, often marked by tall timber poles adorned with strips of colored fabric. We were greeted by Mullah Omari, a thirty-five-year-old Wardaki whose black, shoulder-length hair and beard disappeared seamlessly beneath the loops of his silk turban. Omari, who was traveling with a bodyguard, was Nasratullah’s new commander. We followed Omari’s black Toyota station wagon to a small mosque, whose brightly painted interior was in stark contrast to the drab, earthen exteriors of rural Wardak’s homes. Nasratullah was easily recognizable as Fawad’s brother, but he was brusque and aloof in comparison. His clothes—high-hemmed pants and white high-tops—also distinguished him as a fighter. “When those who were injured returned from Pakistan, that was when I took up a gun,” says Nasratullah. “But I had this idea from a young age.” Before the attack and before he left for

Taliban fighters at a checkpoint outside Sher Khana, Chak district

Iran, he says, “I didn’t have a beard and wasn’t able to actively work for the Taliban.” He does, however, say he used to help local fighters by collecting food and ammunition. Though they acknowledge Nasratullah’s long-held fascination with the Taliban, his relatives believe the attack was a greater motive for his enlistment than he lets on. His cousin Mohammad Omar, who was in Sher Toghi the night of the attack, says that Nasratullah was manipulated by the Taliban. When he arrived home from Iran, Mohammad Omar says, “a group of Taliban came to him and said, ‘Your family has been martyred by infidels,’ and gave him an AK-47 . . . and encouraged him to join them to take revenge.” After joining, Nasratullah spent two weeks doing basic training in a Soviet-era fort in the hills behind Sher Toghi. Since then, he says, he has participated in operations in the neighboring Chak district and Ghazni province, south of Wardak. During Ramadan, this May, he also took part in an aborted offensive to seize Day Mirdad’s district center. Before the sun disappeared behind the mountains on the opposite side of the valley, at the foot of which the four family members are buried, Fawad offered to take me to their home. The northern half of the house, which had been leveled in the attack, was being rebuilt as it had originally stood. Fawad walked me through the bare reconstruction, from the window beneath which he’d slept and through which he’d seen the Chinooks in the snow, to the kitchen where they had run for cover after the first air strike, and to the bathroom where they were sheltering when the final munition struck. In a storage area beneath the house, Fawad unfurled a sack of irregular chunks of steel. Some of them were dull and rusted, while others had retained their shine. They were bomb fragments, picked from the ruins of the house. Manufacturer’s codes and markings were still visible on several pieces. One read eaglepicher, the name of an American battery manufacturer. Brian Castner, a former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer who now works for Amnesty Inter-

national, told me while I was reporting for The Intercept that the weapon was almost certainly a GPS-guided JDAM dropped by U.S. forces. In response to questions about the raid and the deaths of Abdul Jalil’s family members, a spokesperson for coalition forces in Afghanistan wrote, “According to our detailed records, a US airstrike took place on 23 Feb 2019. The strike targeted enemy fighters but subsequently damaged a neighboring home, injuring four children. They were medically evacuated and treated at a nearby hospital for nonlife-threatening injuries. No other casualties were reported.” (The CIA and the Afghan government did not offer any comment.)

hen Abdul Jalil first saw Nasratullah after the attack, he remembers finally letting go of his attempts to restrain his son. “Look what the government and the Americans have done to us,” Nasratullah told his father at the ruined house. “And he was right,” says Abdul Jalil. “As the elder of the family, they could have arrested me, detained me, and conducted an investigation if they had any reports. What was the sin of those young children and the woman they killed?” Rahmatullah Nabil, a fifty-threeyear-old Wardaki and former head of the NDS, is contrite about the mistakes that led to the anti-American, antigovernment insurrection across Afghanistan. He hasn’t visited his childhood home in southern Wardak since 2005. According to photos captured by an Afghan Air Force pilot who is friends with Nabil, the house was destroyed in the fighting. For the spate of civilian deaths in Wardak in 2019, he blames the government’s shrinking footprint in the province and the reliance on signals intelligence over human intelligence. As a result, Nabil says, even he lost relatives who supported the government to the 2019 campaign. But poor intelligence gathering accounts for few of the atrocities. The morning after the attack on Abdul Jalil and Bibi Karima’s family, it wasn’t only in their home that Sher Toghi residents discovered bodies of civilians left by 01. Khan Mohammad, a local mullah who

had once been arrested by the Taliban for providing superstitious tawiz, or talismans, to worshippers—a practice seen by the Taliban as heretical—was killed in an apparent execution, his house destroyed by explosives. A local teacher, Abdul Ghafar, was also executed. His body was found in his own tandoor oven. A taxi driver, Awlia Khan, was also killed in Doorani, one village west. “All these killings were executions,” says Mohammad Shoaib, the brother of Bibi Karima, who saw the victims’ bodies. Nabil agrees that along with ideological and cultural forces, the new generation of Taliban fighters in Wardak is the product of two main factors: first, the American empowerment of ethnic and tribal adversaries; and second, the appetite for avenging the deaths of noncombatant Wardakis and the abuse of detainees at the hands of American and Afghan forces over two decades of war. Now, as the U.S. military departs, the Taliban is more emboldened and more likely to secure power than at any other time since 2001. After President Biden’s April announcement that the U.S. withdrawal would begin on May 1, the Taliban intensified its offensives countrywide. Though it has refrained from attacking departing American troops or Kabul, the Taliban has all but surrounded several major cities, and more than a hundred of the country’s roughly four hundred district centers, including five in Wardak, have fallen. Abdul Jalil battled for twenty years to prevent his children from succumbing to the pull of the insurgency. “I never asked them to work in the fields with me,” says Abdul Jalil. “I wanted them to prioritize their studies.” But Nasratullah was vulnerable to the same fate that befell many of his classmates. “Most Taliban now are university graduates,” Abdul Jalil says. “But because of a lack of jobs, they join the Taliban.” Now Abdul Jalil no longer believed his own arguments. “Before the night raid, he had friends in the Taliban, but we kept him away from them and I used to tell him not to join,” he says of Nasratullah. “But after the night raid, to be honest, we didn’t have any reason to stop him. He had a better reason to join the Taliban than we did to stop him.” Q

LETTER FROM SHER TOGHI

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What the American Academy of Arts and Letters taught me about death By Ann Patchett

went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring a guest, and I invited my friend Patrick Ryan. We boarded the subway downtown and took it all the way to 155th Street, he in his summer suit and me in my best dress. I’m not a New Yorker by any stretch, and Washington Heights was unfamiliar to me. The Academy’s Beaux-Arts building, the long, sloping hill of Trinity Cemetery, and the view of the Hudson River made me feel like we’d caught the train in Kansas and resurfaced in Oz. Writers and artists and composers were coming toward us from every direction, people whose work we’d committed to memory and whose faces we knew on sight. The day was windy, and Patrick and I were Ann Patchett’s new essay collection, These Precious Days, will be published this fall. The collection’s title essay appeared in the January 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

so nervous we ducked down a few stairs beside the enormous building to smoke. When we finished our cigarettes we were brave again. I have such fondness for that memory, that moment, as that would be the summer I would quit smoking for good. No more cigarettes for courage while staring into an elegant cemetery. I had known very little about the Academy before we got there, and understood nothing about how the place worked. At the registration desk, I gave my name and received a program and our table number. Someone introduced me to Tony Kushner.

“Heart,” by Cara Barer © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

Tony Kushner! While shaking his hand, I asked him whether he had won a prize as well. He told me no; he was being inducted. “Am I being inducted?” I asked. Everyone around us laughed. Who knew I was so funny? I’d been invited to visit for the afternoon. I hadn’t been invited to stay. Patrick and I went to look for our table like a couple of middle-schoolers who find themselves in the MIT cafeteria by way of a dream. We located the table and then looked for our place cards. I was seated next to John Updike. When I was young, I read the books that were available, not the books that were appropriate. I read what my mother and stepfather left lying around, which meant that I read Updike. His sentences, his characters, his imperatives filled my brain when my brain was soft and at its most impressionable. Along with Bellow and Roth, he was my influence, the person who had made me want this job in the first place, the person who (I believed)

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was showing me what adult life would look like, what sex and love and work would look like. He stood up to greet me. Of all the things I ever imagined might happen in my life, sitting next to John Updike at a luncheon on the terrace of a Beaux-Arts building beneath a white tent at a table full of flowers was not among them. Lore Segal was seated there, as were Calvin Trillin and Edmund White. Updike asked whom I had come with, and when I told him, he winked at Patrick from across the table. Updike could not have been kinder or more charming. In a crowd of people whom I imagined to be his friends, he was conversationally attentive to me. Still, I could feel the strain in every seam of my composure. I asked him about Bellow, who had died a few weeks before. He shrugged. He said he didn’t know him well. How was that possible, when the two of them had been stacked, one on top of the other, on so many nightstands of my youth? When I could not bear the proximity for another minute, when I feared that I might grab the lapels of his light-colored suit jacket and shout, Don’t you know that you are my god? I gave Patrick the high sign with my eyebrows. We excused ourselves separately and made our way to an empty ballroom. Much of the art on the walls had been made by people who were, at that exact moment, eating lunch beneath the tent. Patrick and I held hands and tried not to scream. “I am sitting next to John Updike!” I scream-whispered. “You are sitting next to John Updike!” he silently screamed in reply. After lunch we were separated, sent off in two directions by staff holding clipboards: Patrick went into the auditorium, while Updike and I took our seats side by side on the stage. Updike was going to present my award, which came with a certificate and a not insignificant check. Joan Didion was there, Gordon Parks, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, John Guare, all of us arranged on risers like a grade school class waiting to have its picture taken. And then someone took our picture. The ceremony that followed was epically long: honors bestowed, lifetime-achievement medals distributed, speeches made. The stage was

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

hot, and as time passed the luncheon receded into distant memory. From where we sat, we could watch the members of the audience falling asleep in their theater seats: family, friends, editors, agents. Every time an award was given, Updike remarked on whether or not a kiss had accompanied the handing over of the certificate and check. “Look,” he said, leaning sideways to whisper. “He kissed her.”

he two hundred and fifty members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters are writers, composers, visual artists, and architects. It is a fixed number. When a member dies, potential new members are nominated and voted on.* Twelve years after my visit, I received a letter informing me of my induction. I stood in my kitchen and stared at the paper in my hand for a very long time. I was thinking of Updike. After my blunder with Tony Kushner, I had never allowed myself to wonder whether I might one day be elected. But someone had died and, in doing so, had made a place for me. The Portrait Gallery is a large room in the Academy building that displays a photograph of everyone who has ever been a member. Black-and-white portraits in identical narrow frames hang floor to ceiling, side by side, without an inch of space in-between. The photos are arranged not in order of birth or death but of induction, as if that were the moment life began. I’d walked through the gallery briefly the first time I visited and had marveled at the assemblage, but when I went back in 2017, I had time to make a real study of the place. There at the beginning was Samuel Clemens, followed by Henry James and Edward MacDowell. They were among the Academy’s founding members in 1898. I walked slowly around the room, letting my gaze run up and down the walls. It was another afternoon in May. Soon we would be called to the luncheon and ceremony. Those things didn’t change. I hadn’t *

In an effort to diversify, the Academy raised the number this year for the first time in its history, from two hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty-three.

had a cigarette in twelve years and was well past missing them. People wandered in and out of the gallery, some of them talking, others standing there, taking it in—W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dos Passos and Winslow Homer and Langston Hughes and Randall Jarrell and Georgia O’Keeffe and Eudora Welty, Steinbeck and Stravinsky, Thornton Wilder and E. B. White—with this defining connection: they were dead. But then I found I. M. Pei, inducted in 1963, the year I was born. He was still alive. After more dead people I found W. S. Merwin, in ducted in 1972. Alive! Then dead, dead, dead, dead—until I found George Crumb, inducted in 1975. Alive. After that, a mix: alive and alive and dead and dead and dead and alive. It went like that, broken up, almost equal for a few short minutes, until finally the balance tipped and more and more people were alive, fewer were dead. There was John Updike, the great man, whose work was now irretrievably out of fashion. Was there a college student anywhere who cut her teeth on those Rabbit novels now? Probably not. Could I have wished for a better influence in my early life, when I was still capable of being influenced? Never. There was Grace Paley, who had died in 2007. She had been my teacher in college. Her stories, full of practical activism, are perfect for these times, but who’s to say that anyone’s getting around to them? Two more of my teachers were on the wall—Allan Gurganus and Russell Banks— still very much alive. And then at last I came to the end of my review and found, already framed and hanging, the group of writers who would be inducted in a matter of hours: Kay Ryan, Edward Hirsch, Amy Hempel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Colum McCann, Junot Díaz, Henri Cole, Ann Patchett. Me. My framed black-and-white photograph so clearly in the camp of the living. The picture I’d chosen to send was joyful because joyful was how I felt when they asked for one. I’m showing all my teeth and am completely out of step with every serious and circumspect photograph surrounding me. If you were to look at all those photos without knowing who

any of us were, you would point to mine and say, “That one’s still alive.” But the math in this room was inescapable—two hundred and fifty seats at the table and no one gets to stay. Over time, what is considered to be the center of the exhibition will shift, and my photograph will eventually be in the middle, closer to the group of those who are mostly dead, and then finally enveloped into the entirely dead. Dying was the essential contract, after all. The Portrait Gallery laid it out clearly: this is where I am, and this is where I’m going. Somewhere a bell was ringing. We were being called outside to lunch. For a split second I wondered whether I hadn’t made a mistake by accepting the invitation, handing over my picture. Wasn’t that a laugh? It was a beautiful day, a day of celebration. We ate and then I took my place on the risers with the rest of my class.

oon after getting home, I received a small white envelope in the mail with a small white card inside. the officers of the american academy of arts and letters note with sorrow the death of the novelist denis johnson, of california, on wednesday, may twenty-fourth, two thousand seventeen, at the age of sixty-seven. mr. johnson was elected in two thousand fourteen.

The simple formality of the announcement moved me, and so I kept it. Another one came in June: A. R. Gurney was dead. In July, it was Sam Shepard. I had a wooden box made to hold the cards. In the years since becoming a member, I’ve received forty-five of them. Ursula K. Le Guin died eight months after being inducted, her picture just a couple of frames over from mine. Philip Roth, who had been inducted in 1970, died the week after Tom Wolfe, who was inducted in 1999. The human impulse is to look for order, but there isn’t any. People come and go. When you try to find your place among all the living and dead, the numbers are unmanageable, but working within a fixed group—two hundred and fifty

people, one building, a roomful of framed photographs—there’s no fooling yourself. Is this my time? Maybe and maybe not, but my time is coming, and it should. Someone out there is waiting for my place. John Updike died of lung cancer in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, three and a half years after I first stood on 155th Street and looked down the green lawn of Trinity Cemetery and out to the Hudson River, three and a half years after I sat beside him onstage. If I could stop time, it would be to read all of his books— the stories and novels and poetry and essays and criticism, the successful books and the failures, the ones I’d read before and the ones I’d never heard of. I wouldn’t care what anyone had to say about them. There would be so much of life left for me if that were all I asked for. “Oh,” he had whispered after a particularly disappointing award presentation. “No kiss.” When my name was called we walked down to the lectern together and he handed me the framed certificate and check, then kissed me on the cheek, the way a father kisses a daughter on her wedding day before stepping back. That was the gift, not the award or the induction. It was the beautiful day, the view of the river, the long sloping lawn of the cemetery, the single cigarette, that kiss. Q September Index Sources 1 Federal Aviation Administration; 2,3 Christopher E. Mason, Weill Cornell Medicine (NYC); 4 Walker Consultants (Indianapolis); 5 Office of the Mayor of New York City; 6 Stephan J. Schmidt, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.); 7,8 Kevin N. Foster, Arizona Burn Center (Phoenix); 9 National Park Service (Three Rivers, Calif.); 10 The Xerces Society (Portland, Ore.); 11 Sadie J. Ryan, University of Florida (Gainesville); 12,13 Occupational Safety and Health Administration; 14,15 Oscar Jonsson, IE University (Madrid); 16 Integralia (Mexico City); 17 Pew Research Center (Washington); 18–21 Gallup (Washington); 22–24 YouGov (NYC); 25–27 Benjamin Gebre-Medhin, Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Mass.); 28–30 Federal Bureau of Prisons; 31 Transparency International (Berlin); 32,33 Patrick Cooney, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor); 34 National Association of Realtors (Chicago); 35 Bankrate (NYC); 36 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing); 37 Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (Beijing); 38,39 YouGov.

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

Illustrations by Matt Rota. Source photographs courtesy the author

EATING THE WHALE A personal history of meat By Wyatt Williams

landed in Barrow, Alaska, on a bright June night. The flight had been long, with a stop in Minneapolis, a layover in Anchorage, and another stop in Prudhoe Bay before my arrival at Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport. It is as far north as Alaska Airlines flies. The sun had risen a few days ago and wouldn’t set again for weeks. This all happened near the end of the two centuries during which the town had been known as Barrow. In the fall, the town would vote to change the name back to Utqiagvik. ˙ The place had been known by that name (or something like it) for hundreds of years prior, long before white whalers and explorers started showing up and naming things after themselves. But the vote would happen later, after I left. On the day I arrived, my plane ticket said Barrow. The signs said Barrow. Everyone called it Barrow. So this part of the story hap-

Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating, which will be published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.

pened in Barrow, a town that does and does not exist anymore. On the southern edge of town, where the road meets the open tundra, there is a cemetery. It is an uneven place. The graves are lumpy and round and wide, and the white crosses that mark each body are crooked and have settled in such a way that they point in contrary directions. In the winter, the ground is frozen and must be broken with augers to dig a grave. In the spring and summer, after the sun emerges from the arctic night and the snow melts, the ground loosens a bit and digging can be done by hand. It is one of the most colorful places in town, full of bright artificial flowers and makeshift memorials and handmade decorations. The bodies buried here freeze in the soil before decay can begin. The dirt placed on top will never quite flatten out. The rolling piles of dirt and old grassy mounds offer evidence of the people below. Eventually, the cycles of the frozen tundra will swell the ground, heaving many of the graves up even higher, as if the bodies are being rejected. The land does not want the past to be buried.

Tourists come here every year to see the northern lights or watch for migratory birds. Some hope to glimpse a polar bear before the species goes extinct. I’d come because I wanted to eat a whale.

rom the graveyard, the road into town leads past a field of giant satellites, huge white dishes that bring in the rest of the world: phone service and weather reports and television channels. In most places, satellites point up, toward the sky, but here they point straight ahead. In this place, about as close to the North Pole as one can live, you need only look over your shoulder to the right and there you can see it, the end of the earth. Beyond the satellites, the road passes a gravel pit. It is a cliffside operation that puts out pearly black pebbles by the ton. Every year, when the melting waters of the Chukchi Sea take more land from the coast of Barrow, dump trucks of gravel will repair whatever holes they can fill. It is a failing operation. The town gets smaller every year, but the gravel trucks do what they can.

LETTER FROM ALASKA

Outside the airport, the wind was whipping my face, freezing cold, and the sun was high up in the cloudless sky. I squinted, couldn’t see through the glare, put on sunglasses. A beatup Toyota rolled down the road and I waved him over. He took me to a restaurant called Northern Lights. I was tired and hungry and the waitress brought me a thirty-dollar plate of chicken bulgogi. The driver hung around, said he didn’t have anywhere else to be at this hour. He was from Myanmar, had been here for a few years, didn’t speak much English. He drove me down a long road to a rusted Quonset hut on the edge of town. I’d rented a room there, but no one was home. I found a key to the front door in a pickup parked out front. I lay down in a bed I figured was mine, tried to close the blinds and shut out the night sun. I didn’t sleep well. The blinds were no help. I woke several times, disoriented by the bright sky, unable to tell whether it was night or morning. I made coffee and put on gloves and wandered around in the cold. Barrow is on the coast of the Chukchi Sea, about three hundred and twenty miles north of the Arctic Circle. It is a narrow town—only as wide as the airport runway is long—that runs down the cold dark coastline until it disappears. The land slopes northeast, about a thousand miles shy of the North Pole. The roads have been laid cockeyed to the coast and are interrupted by a handful of lagoons that separate the town’s three main districts. Owing to this odd municipal grid, there is no single main drag, though Stevenson Street comes close. The roads have never been paved. They are simply packed dirt, like the paths of any town still on some kind of frontier. The town’s oldest buildings are clustered together near the Utqiagvik ˙ Presbyterian Church, marked with a whalebone sign dated 1898. They are wood-frame houses and steeple churches roofed with tar shingles and painted simple colors: white, blue, green. They look like they belong in New England. Squint and you can see a rough, flat Nantucket. Flower beds are scarce here; pansies do not thrive. The yards are

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gardens of the past. There are tangles of caribou antlers stacked like dead branches on Pisokak Street. Dogsleds, their old wooden slats long broken and faded the color of slate, lean up against the houses one block over on Okpik. Barren umiaks, stripped of the stretched sealskins that once made them float, lie about like skeletons. Frayed ropes are everywhere in knots and coils. Every home has a menagerie of hoists, blocks, hooks, bones. It is not true to say that there are no trees in Barrow. In a yard off Stevenson Street, there is a steel pipe with baleen attached to it like palm fronds. The man who lives there likes to tell a joke: “Here in Barrow, we’ve got a beautiful woman behind every tree.” He put up his homemade palm tree, the only tree in town, so that his wife would let him keep telling it. On the other side of a couple lagoons is Browerville, the part of town built mostly after its namesake, the whaler Charles Brower, died in 1945. You can see it in the shapes of the buildings. The three-story Top of the World Hotel, where tourists come to see the northern lights, sits next to the squat post office, where the tourists send postcards with pictures of polar bears. The wide parking lot and familiar big-box Alaska Commercial grocery store could be anywhere: Bloomington, Tampa, Portland. The prices are higher here, though the food is mostly the same: bags of lettuce, boxes of strawberries, sixtycount portions of frozen breaded chicken strips. The third part of town, past more lagoons, is or was the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. Though it closed in 1981, everyone here still calls this area NARL. The road that runs through it is still known as NARL Road, and the buildings that NARL built are all still here. The idea was a simple one: whatever it was that was happening out here on the edge of the earth needed to be studied—the soil, the weather, the wildlife. They put up Quonset huts and hangars and dorms, brought in scientists. Eventually, the Navy gave the land to the local tribal corporation, a gift to the people they’d

stolen the land from in the first place. A small college operates on the property today. Here, almost hidden at the far edge of town, the Air Force built part of the western end of the Distant Early Warning Line. When this radar was installed, shortly after the end of the Second World War, the technology was new and served only one purpose. It was here in the Arctic that everyone expected the planes to come flying in from the USSR. They would be carrying nuclear weapons to drop on our major cities, which would trigger a chain reaction around the world, which would ultimately be reduced to cinders. Whenever it came, the end of the world would begin in Barrow.

reviewed restaurants for years. It wore me out. I had become accustomed, as many restaurant critics do, to having my tastes endlessly catered to. I only noticed when they weren’t. It was a kind of confusion, my belief that the things I wanted from the world could be ordered as if they were items on a menu. I believed I was writing a book; I believed it would contain everything I wanted it to contain. Though I quietly allowed the distinction of my taste to somehow justify the obscenity of my privilege, I can see now that I had lost the ability to discern what my tastes revealed about myself. I had been doing this work long enough to grow weary of culinary illusions. I no longer liked dishes that depended on tricks or anything too clever. Culinary trompe l’oeil bored me. I was beginning to understand that our food culture had become obsessed with, in fact desired, being fooled. I wanted to look the animal in the eye. I had not yet recognized that I was fooling myself, that my own illusions were the ones preventing me from finishing the book, that I had confused my ability to gather facts with the very different task of understanding them, that I believed the work to be nearly finished when it had hardly begun. I was interested in some of the conventional questions—Why do we kill animals and why do we eat them? Is it right or wrong? What constitutes ethical behavior in a

godless world?—but I wasn’t deluded enough to believe that I would find their answers. I had read all of the books that claimed to have them, and I hadn’t been convinced. I thought I could settle for how instead of why: How do we kill animals? How do we eat them? Those were questions with answers. I thought the facts could be enough. There is an alternate definition for meat, one that simply means the thing inside of the thing—i.e., the meat of a coconut or the meat of a problem. My inquiry aimed to understand the living, the dead, and the part in the middle as well, the thing inside of the thing. I’m trying to tell you why I had finally resolved to taste whale.

hen Charles Brower arrived here in 1886, there were no stores, no farms, no butchers hawking meat by the piece. Yet, by his account, life was good, food was plenty. You put your

line in a bay and pulled out a week’s worth of fish in an hour. Flocks of migratory birds passed by in such numbers that this place was named for it. Ukpeagvik means “the place to hunt snowy owls.” The Iñupiat people had lived and eaten well for centuries before Brower came around. In the backcountry caribou were everywhere; you didn’t even need a gun to hunt them. Locals had built a simple trap: two wide fences made from piles of sod and pillars of black moss that narrowed to a lake. Anytime a decent herd of caribou came along, a few women and children would spook them down between the fences until they were led to the lake, where the caribou would attempt to swim to freedom. They never made it far: men waited in umiaks to spear the animals and drag the bodies back to dry land, where they would make dinner. Brower had not come to Barrow for a handful of fish or a leg of caribou, though. He’d come for whales. He found plenty of them. Most of the local folks welcomed him in.

They let him join their crews, which still went out into the arctic waters in sealskin-covered boats. He paddled along as they jabbed stone and ivory harpoons at black bowhead whales. He helped pull ropes, hauling their kills up above the ice. He sawed at the flesh, cutting away the long strips of muktuk, until he, like all of the men and women around him, was covered in blood and tired of the work. Brower was born in Manhattan in 1863 while his father was fighting in the Civil War. He left to work on his first ship at fourteen. By nineteen, he was a seasoned third mate on the C. C. Chapman when it caught fire rounding Cape Horn. The ship’s hatches blew open, flames roaring from a blaze in the coal storage, but the captain insisted that they sail on to San Francisco. By the time Brower stepped onto land, the crew had navigated the burning boat for fifty-two days and six thousand miles.

LETTER FROM ALASKA

Brower set out again less than a fangled horseless buggies,” he wrote. year later, on an expedition to look for Everything that baleen had once coal on the northern coast of Alaska. been used for was now being reThere had been rumors of enormous placed by a new, cheaper, more pracreserves: enough coal to fuel a fleet tical invention: plastic. Whale oil of whaling boats without the added was made redundant by the petroleum expense of shipping it north. Their industry. In a few decades, it would be crew found them, black veins up to oil men, rather than whale men, comfourteen feet wide, running through ing to the North Slope looking for Corwin Bluff. As they tried to mine their fortunes. the coal bed, the cliff collapsed in an When the market bottomed out, avalanche, nearly killing the crew that Brower quit whaling but stayed in had come to find it. The expedition Barrow. He shifted his business, was abandoned and the ship returned Cape Smythe Whaling and Trading home, but Brower decided to carry on, Company, to focus on trapping aniby sled, to the northernmost point he mals and trading furs. He lived could find. comfortably in a white home with a By that time in the Western world, pool table and a library. He played whales had become part of the useful host to visitors curious about the stuff of modern life. Baleen, the thin black filter with which bowhead whales extract their food from water, SLICED INTO THE DENSE FLESH had been found to have other applications. It was both pliable and AND PUT A SLIVER IN MY MOUTH. IT strong, a practical material. TASTED OCEANIC, RICH WITH THE Coachmen in Manhattan drove their horses with buggy whips made SALT AND FUNK OF THE SEA of whale. The well-dressed woman inside the coach bound her breasts in a corset lined with whale. A man walking down the avenue opened an Arctic. When an anthropologist came umbrella to guard against the rain, the looking for artifacts, Brower helped ribs of the parasol made from whale. him by hiring a team of local chilWhen he arrived home and the womdren to do the digging. Eventually, an stepped out from the coach to meet they uncovered thousands of archaehim, they would light a flickering lanological remains, which were sold to tern burning with whale oil. On a the American Museum of Natural mattress lined with whale, they would History in New York. The children lie together. were paid in chewing gum. Not long after arriving in BarBrower mostly ate what the locals row, Brower became one the most called “white man’s food”: flapjacks successful whalers of his generaand eggs, pot roast and sauerkraut. tion. He made a fortune in a single He had ora nges a nd ba na na s season; after several years, he could shipped in fresh. Local children had have taken his earnings back to to be taught to peel them; they’d Manhattan, where eventually he never had a piece of fruit before. would’ve been feted with parties at Eventually, his trading company bethe Explorers Club, and retired came a place to get the sort of procomfortably far from the Arctic visions that hadn’t been here: cans Circle. In his partially fabricated of milk, bags of flour, boxes of tea, memoir, Fifty Years Below Zero, dried fruit. In the end, this was his published only a few years before his business. Brower became Barrow’s death in 1945, Brower explained first grocer. what happened next. Corsets went out of fashion. Buggy ut in the cold waters of the whips became useless. “Where forChukchi Sea, there were merly a good whip with a bone heart bowhead whales swimming. had been a smart adjunct to any Bowheads travel thousands of miles moonlit buggy ride, young men now in their annual migrations. The largchugged their girls around in newest among them measure up to sixty-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

five feet long and weigh more than one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. They glide along, propelled by their smooth, black tails. They eat all day, thousands upon thousands of krill spilling into their gullets. They look for other whales, for mates. They sing long, complicated songs in a language we cannot comprehend. They sing to one another. It’s true that there are many people in this world who believe that killing and eating such a beautiful, complicated creature is a horrible thing to do. Here on the coast of the Chukchi Sea, that is a plainly foolish opinion. Nothing grows in Barrow. There are no farms. The food sold at the town grocery store is extraordinarily expensive because it has to be flown hundreds or thousands of miles. To live here has always meant to hunt snowy owls, to hook fish, to harpoon whales. Every year the ice melt becomes more and more unpredictable. The coastline is slowly disappearing. The changing climate will eventually destroy this town, a coming apocalypse only worsened by the jet fuel burned to bring in the bird watchers and nature lovers, to feed them frozen junk. Yet it is instead the whalers here who are vilified by outsiders, the whalers who fear a misguided “save the whales” campaign might end their seasonal allotments. As if it were somehow better to eat from bags of frozen chicken flown in from Arkansas. This is a cruel irony. I suppose I’d come here in part to write a story that explored some of this. I wanted to tell people that if only we could eat more like the whalers in Barrow, sharing the food of our ow n communities, we’d probably be better off. Something like that. But I knew it wouldn’t really matter. It would irritate the people who lived here and it would irritate the people who lived far away. The world would go on continuing to end.

nalukataq was scheduled for the day after I arrived. When the ice begins to melt and it is unsafe to go out into the water and hunt, the whaling crews divvy up their catch from the spring season

Otter Pendant among any community members who care to attend. That’s a nalukataq. Andrew, the man who was renting me a room in his house, asked me to collect a share of whale, if I was already planning to stop by. Anyone can go, he said. He was right. I walked down to the beach and sat on the tarp where everyone else in town was sitting. The friendly people next to me asked who I was and where I’d come from. I said I was staying in Andrew’s house in NARL and that he had asked me to collect a share. They said, “Oh, of course, Andrew.” A little while later, a woman with a microphone said a prayer and sang a song. Children poured hot tea into my thermos. Big pots of goose soup were carried around and ladled into bowls. Eventually, the whaling crew brought their whales to the beach. Before this day, they had spent hours and hours chopping and sawing these giants into small pieces that could be evenly divided among the crowd. They carried in dozens of white cardboard boxes, each stuffed with pieces of whale. They rolled in barrels filled to the top with long strips of whale. Everyone sat patiently as the captain gave directions. Three pieces of meat for everyone. Three pieces of fat for everyone. Three pieces of dried liver for everyone. As the crew patiently walked through the crowd, counting out each scrap so that everyone would get a fair portion, the people sitting next to me were kind enough to explain how I should eat. When the meat was handed out, they told me to eat it raw. They’d come prepared with paper plates and handed me one. I sliced into the dark-red, dense flesh and put a sliver in my mouth. It was bloody, like fresh beef, but it tasted oceanic, rich with the salt and funk of the sea. After that came strips of fat, which they said were best to save for cooking. Then came a bucket of something dark and sludgy. My neighbors explained that this was meat and fat and skin that had been fermented in blood. They said to cut the blubber into very thin strips to make it easier to chew. The flavor

was intense, more potent than any aged meat I’d ever tasted. It gave me the sensation of being completely satiated after only a few bites. The children came back around, refilling every cup with tea. The crew handed out pieces of fried bread and fresh oranges. The people around me thought that was very generous, giving everyone an orange like that. It was a polite and friendly meal, not unlike a church potluck. I think that before I’d come, I had vaguely expected to see a whale, or at least most of one, sitting up on the ice. I’d come the wrong week if I wanted to see the whole thing. Before I had arrived, I’d watched some footage. Harpoons darting through the air; blood brightening the black water; whales diving under for their lives; white lines pulling them back up. The process is not unlike a bullfight: a large body being slowly worn down, bled and exhausted until it acquiesces to death. I saw none of that while I was there. The killing and eating were kept separate. The whale I ate that day looked the way meat always does: cut up into the small pieces we can handle. In the evening, I brought back the share of whale meat and fat that Andrew had asked me to pick up. I lay awake in bed, the midnight sun shining in my window, wondering again why exactly I had come to this place.

he next morning I met a man named Joe who promised to show me his museum. The museum was a two-story house overlooking the Arctic Ocean. I arrived before he did and stood in the yard. It was a garden of old things: caribou antlers and flat tires, ropes and chains, harpoons and hooks, driedout bearded sealskins sewn together, and whale bones piled up all around like oak branches. The wind was burning my face and gray clouds had come in to hide the sun. I was just about to give up and leave when Joe came limping along the road to let me in. He was small and frail, with graying hair. We climbed up a narrow staircase on the side of the house. I walked behind him, unsure if he would fall, and he began to talk.

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LETTER FROM ALASKA

11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011

“I delivered water around town with two trucks for twenty-eight years. I did that till 2002 and now I don’t work anymore. Four years ago, I had a bunch of strokes and they medevaced me to Anchorage and I was unconscious for eleven days. The doctors were in the room ready to unplug me when I woke up. I don’t work anymore now but I’m doing okay. I don’t stay here anymore. I’d like to stay here.” He unlocked the door to the second story and, as it slowly swung open, I could see why he couldn’t live here anymore. The entrance was a passageway into a labyrinth of animals. A polar bear was posed with its mouth open, teeth bared. Another one was reduced to a rug, its head peering up from the floor. A wolf narrowed its eyes from behind a shelf. A caribou, an elk, a ram with its horns grown in thick spirals. Long-tailed foxes and skinny marmots. A howling coyote. They were all frozen still in this dim room, hardly lit for all of the silhouettes and shadows cast by the menagerie and the shelves they had been collected on, almost impassible but for a couple of paths. The museum had outgrown him. There wasn’t room for him anymore. “The animals in here are arctic animals. Make yourself at home. Take pictures if you want and ask questions. Sorry, nothing is for sale.” I mostly didn’t have to ask questions. He kept talking as I tried to understand this place, the thing he called a museum. It was almost possible to imagine when it had been a simple collection. Back against the main wall, there were a few bits of whale bone and small animals on a shelf. In a side room, there were glass cases stuffed with rusted metal and worn-out wood. They looked like they could be pieces from the whaling boats that the Yankees had brought here a century and a half ago. Maybe. “I was pretty broke when I got here and wanted some stuff, and there was stuff for sale around town but it cost more than what I could deal with. So I went to the beach and found a bunch of bones and different things, and I just ended up

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

collecting a bunch of stuff from the beach and wherever,” he said. It was hard to focus on any one thing, because in front of every one thing, Joe had positioned another. In front of one shelf of animals, he’d built another shelf and put animals on that one, too. There was so much more: Carling Black Label beer cans, McDonald’s Big Mac containers, broken guns and framed newspaper clippings, paintings and photographs, skins and feathers and carvings. Joe explained that forty years ago he had come here wanting something simple. He wanted to see a polar bear. He could not explain why he wanted to see a polar bear. He just said he was young and that was what he wanted. And soon after he wanted something more. And again and again. This is what happens when you want to understand, when you try to know everything you can know. It is a beautiful temptation, to collect from the world and arrange it so that the collection reduces the world around it, so that things around us that were once unexplainable and unknowable can now be seen clearly with a single glance. This is what maps, museums, books, and farms try to do. They try to make the world comprehensible. They organize nature. This is what I wanted to do, I suppose. The trouble is that the world isn’t reducible in that way, it can’t be understood at a glance. It can’t be made a single inch smaller than it is. Yet we insist on trying to understand. It is a simple, human desire. We keep adding to our arrangements, to our museums, animal after animal, bone after bone, until there’s no more room. What’s left behind isn’t as big as the world, and somehow much smaller than the mystery that surrounds it. The failed collections of broken men. Dim rooms full of junk.

n my last day, I walked around aimlessly for some time, standing out on the beach taking photos of what would’ve been a sunrise if the sun had ever set. I walked between the old houses. I drank some coffee. I visited the graveyard and took pictures of the fake flowers. I couldn’t

have told you what I was looking for. I was walking down a dirt road when a man in a rusty red pickup stopped and rolled down his window. It was Abel, Andrew’s neighbor, whom I’d met at the nalukataq a couple of days before. He asked me if I wanted a ride, said that he was going to pick up some water, would I give him a hand? I said, Sure. “You said the other day you’re a writer. What kind of story do you want to write? What do you want to know?” he asked. I told him that I’d come here because of the whales, that I wanted to eat whale but that I also wanted to know more about it, that my job was mostly just going places and asking people questions and writing down what they said and did. I said I figured I should talk to a hunter, someone who could tell me more about killing whales and eating them. “Are you a hunter?” I asked. He said he’d been hunting his whole life. “Could you tell me about the whales?” I asked. “I don’t really feel like getting into all that,” he said. I was relieved, to be honest. Sitting in Abel’s truck after visiting Joe’s museum, I didn’t want to be the guy who was just here to get something from someone else, to add it to my little collection of notes. We stopped and picked up some water, and I helped him load it in the truck. I figured he could drop me off wherever since I wasn’t really going anywhere. But he said, “Let me show you a place.” He drove his truck down to the end of the road, past the Cold War runway, past the dark-blue football field, and past the camps for hunting ducks, until the road gave out in a dusty circle and all we could see was a long strip of gravel leading out to the horizon, melting ice on either side. Between us and the point there was a sign posted: no trespassing. He said this was as far as he could take me. “Out there, past the sign, that’s where we go, where I’ve gone every year since I was old enough to stand,” he said.

We sat in silence for a little while until he spoke again. “What you should write about is the lineage,” he said. I didn’t understand him at first. I couldn’t hear the word, so I asked him to repeat it, but even when he said it and I heard it, I didn’t understand what he meant. “What’s the lineage?” I asked. He said the lineage was the way he’d been taught, the way he’d gone out there and learned the same thing his father had learned, that his father had learned the same thing his father’s father had learned, and so on. “So what do you learn out there?” I asked, pointing out at the gravel disappearing into the horizon. “The first thing you learn is how to make tea,” he said. After a while, he turned the car around and dropped me off back in town. That night, I decided to walk past the sign.

ndrew’s house had filled up with research assistants talking about their latest plans, satellite transmitters on bearded seals, population counts and white papers. We had a little potluck. I made a salad with ingredients flown in from California: limes, avocados, cherry tomatoes, butter lettuce. It cost a small fortune. Andrew made two courses of whale. For the first, he sliced raw muktuk into perfect little rectangles, the size of sashimi, and sprinkled them with Old Bay. The fat melted on my tongue. For the second, he braised a hunk of whale meat in its own juices in a slow cooker until the whole house was steaming with that oceanic smell. The strands fell apart like tender stewed beef. We sipped from a bottle of whiskey I’d brought in on the plane. Around midnight, I said I still hadn’t seen the point. That I’d only stopped at the no trespassing sign. I said I wanted to see whatever was on the other side. I guess I still thought that I’d come here to find something, to have something I could leave with. A couple of the assistants said they’d come with me. Polar bears were known to prowl out there, they said. It wouldn’t be safe to go alone.

They brought a shotgun. Andrew dropped us off at the sign, and we started to walk. I’d bought special boots for this trip. They were shin high and waterproof and steel toed and heavy in the heels, and as we stepped out into the gravel, I watched my foot sink deep into the rocks with each step. I had to pull each foot up, one after the other. The clouds had come in thick and the wind was strong. The assistants walked ahead, one with his hand on the gun. For an hour or so, this was all we did, put one foot in front of the other, dragging them through the gravel. It was easy to feel as if we had stepped out of time altogether, that it was both day and night, yesterday and today. The mind wandered. The strip of gravel we walked along grew narrower and narrower. We could see how the rising waters on either side might swallow it any day. We could see this was a place where the world would begin to end. When we got to the end of the earth, we found a boneyard scattered with pieces of whale. There were a few fresh bones, ribs still stuck with pieces of white fat and blood, but mostly there were old and weathered remnants, bones turned gray like stone. They seemed ancient. The bones were everywhere in piles and stacks, long thin ribs and thick old spinal columns and skulls sinking into the gravel. All through them were more recent things: bits of driftwood, potato chip bags, rusty cans, and soda bottles. Plenty of trash. An old boat. The midnight sun came out from behind the clouds and the ice glistened. We stood there and watched the melting ice float by. I was searching that night. I still believed I could find it. I listened closely and saw everything my eyes could see. I tried to feel what I could with the numb skin on my face. The wind whistling past our ears, the sun glowing on our heads, the bones crunching beneath our feet. And like every other time, there weren’t any words. Nature offered the answer that nature always does. I wrote nothing in my notes. Q

LETTER FROM ALASKA

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THE THIRD FORCE On stupidity and transcendence By Garret Keizer

n 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Na zis, a F r e n c h cl e r g y m a n named André Trocmé stepped into the open air with a revised view of the human condition. “Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil,” writes one of his chroniclers. “From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over this world: stupidity.” Trocmé’s eureka was by no means unique—his German contemporary and co-religionist Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that stupidity (or “folly,” depending on your translation) was “a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice”—and it still rings true Garret Keizer is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His essay “Labor’s Last Stand” appeared in the September 2018 issue.

today. From the troglodytic inanities of entertainments such as the Instagram account Girls Getting Hurt (894,000 followers) to the pyrotechnic disasters of gender-reveal parties, stupidity is everywhere we look, not least of all in those who look for it everywhere but within themselves. My own Trocmé moment came with a photo in the New York Times of an angry crowd protesting the tyranny of face masks in the midst of an “exaggerated” pandemic, an ominous prelude to the storming of the Capitol the following year to overturn a “stolen” election. As luck would have it, the antimask protests were taking place at the same time that my wife

Untitled mixed-media artworks, 2020, by Fred Tomaselli © The artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York City. Photographs of the artworks by Phoebe d’Heurle

was reading about England during the Second World War, so there was this repeated dinnertime comparison of the prodigious sacrifices made by bombed-out Londoners with those that peacetime Michiganders found insufferable enough to justify calling up the militia. “Delusional,” “obstinate,” and “perverse” seemed woefully inadequate descriptors, and stupid regrettably unkind, but there it was. What else could you call it? “Stupid” doesn’t mean unintelligent or even uninformed. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin was closer to the mark when he defined stupidity as a “loss of reality.” It’s possible to take Voegelin’s definition a step further and say that stupidity is a denial of reality to the degree that one’s own survival, to say nothing of the survival of others, is imperiled. “Too dumb to live,” we might say, summoning metaphors of dodo birds and dinosaurs, creatures who may not have been especially

ESSAY

unintelligent but who owe their reputations as lamebrains in large part to their extinction. Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me. Socrates held that human beings do not knowingly act against their best interests; perhaps his wisdom made it hard for him to imagine a human being who could say, “To hell with my best interests, and screw Socrates too.” A willful loss of reality, however death-defying it may appear, is never far from a wish for death.

he widespread stupidity that pinhead populism and COVID-19 have brought to the fore goes far beyond the disdain for intellectuals that has been a current in American culture since the nation’s inception. For a sense of how far, consider this curious passage from Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 Anti-intellectualism in American Life: It would . . . be mistaken, as well as uncharitable, to imagine that the men and women who from time to time carry the banners of anti-intellectualism are of necessity committed to it as though it were a positive creed or a kind of principle. In fact, anti-intellectualism is usually the incidental consequence of some other intention, often some justifiable intention. Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: “Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!”

I find the passage striking for two reasons. First, because in light of such bumper-sticker slogans as make liberals cry again and how ’bout i put my carbon footprint up your liberal ass?, it would seem that some people do rise in the morning with the intention of tormenting their thoughtful neighbors and strangling any number of ideas, not a few of which are subsumed under the political philosophy with the carbon footprint up its rectum. It would also seem—and this is the second reason the passage hit me so hard— that the liberal idea typified by Hofstadter’s generous disclaimer, his im-

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

plied insistence that most people are better than they seem, has indeed been strangled, or at the very least, is gasping for air. Who talks that way today? And therein lies the rub. More than the parade of people walking into lampposts while gawking at their phones; more than the insatiable appetite for any kind of technologically enhanced spectacle, to the extent that political conventions, big-ticket sporting events, and megachurch services are virtually indistinguishable from one another or from a Nuremberg rally in their obsessive reaching for the unreal; more than

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT SOME INDIVIDUALS EMBRACE STUPIDITY BECAUSE THEY’RE AFRAID OF BEING ALONE

the open disdain for science; more than the oxymoronic statement “I believe in science”—I know of no more definitive expression of stupidity than proudly professing a total inability to understand an opponent’s position on a controversial issue. That a fetus is an integral part of a woman’s body and thus under her sovereign moral control, that a fetus is a form of human life entitled to certain protections, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get rid of guns, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get a gun—“I simply can’t understand how anyone can think like that.” Really? Can’t agree with it, sure. Can’t accept its basic premises, fine. But can’t understand it? And yet I catch myself saying this all the time, and what is more, I think I might be telling the truth. Because after a while the refusal to understand becomes the inability to understand. Chronic stupidity is not the result of injury or genetics; it’s a learned behavior. We acquire it like a microwave or a suntan. What Dr. Johnson said of an acquaintance is a shoe that fits a whole marching multitude of feet: Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to

become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.

o what prompts people to embrace stupidity and cling to it even if it kills them—might we at least be able to understand that? Anyone who believes in popular government had better try. A natural ally of all authoritarian regimes, stupidity threatens progressive democracy in two ways: first by impeding its initiatives, second and more fatally by undermining any faith that those initiatives are possible or worth the effort. What good is “power to the people” if the people are dolts? It’s possible that some individuals embrace stupidity because they’re afraid of being alone. Idiocy loves company more than misery does. When I taught school, I often remarked on the touching inclusiveness of the druggie segment of the student population. Looks, grades, and athletic prowess were of no account; the only requirement was that you do dope. There is an even more welcoming social circle where the only requirement is that you be a dope. Who among us hasn’t basked for an hour or two in the self-congratulatory stupor of the like-minded? In contrast, thoughtfulness can be a lonely choice, especially when accompanied by courage. (Nietzsche contra Twitter: “You seek followers? Seek zeroes!”) If COVID-19 has highlighted anything as much as some people’s feckless disregard for scientific evidence and the health of their neighbors, it’s the utter and often poignant inability of many people to endure solitude—or even, in some cases, to avoid a large crowd. If they can’t be in a packed bar, gym, or banquet hall, they’d just as soon be dead. Writing several years before he would be executed for his progressively isolating role in a plot to overthrow Hitler, Bonhoeffer says, We note . . . that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

He goes on to say that although a stupid person is usually stubborn, his

stubbornness shouldn’t be mistaken for independence. “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.” In short, one is dealing with extreme forms of groupthink. What James Baldwin said about liars, that they “travel in packs,” might also apply to the stupid, especially if stupidity is seen as a matter of lying to oneself. Liars “need each other,” Baldwin says,

of a gun; in the glorious future, robots and genetic engineers will save us from the indignity of brushing our teeth. Whether on horseback or in a hovercraft, a fool’s feet never touch the ground. He is borne aloft, like a maharaja or an infant. Those who study stupidity as a psychological phenomenon have noted that conspicuously stupid acts often result from what Robert J. Sternberg

for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie. . . . That is why all liars are cruel and filthyminded—one’s merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real.

But a confederacy of dunces of fers more than social acceptance through a shared denial of reality. What the stupid crave above all else is to transcend reality. To get above and beyond it. To feel all four tires leave the ground as one’s turbocharged chariot hurtles over the canyon in a Blu-ray apotheosis of brainless splendor. Reality, after all, is nothing if not constraining. Time, space, laws, facts, rocks, relatives, debts, and taxes all conspire to thwart the will and worry the mind. Auden dubbed the middle years of the twentieth century the Age of Anxiety; in the Age of Stupidity, anxiety takes a hike. The burdens of the past (e.g., slavery and Jim Crow) and the dangers of the future (e.g., environmental catastrophe) are transcended in a grotesque parody of “living in the moment,” grotesque because time inevitably reasserts itself in the form of sentimental history and puerile futurism. In the glorious past, real (that is, white) Americans doled out liberty and justice from the sanctified barrel

calls “feelings of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability.” No doubt traveling in a pack can supply the necessary lift, but some people manage it quite nicely on their own. The state in which I live is home to one of the more docile species of bears on the continent, yet in the past decade black bears have attacked at least two women who persisted, in spite of neighbors’ complaints and game wardens’ warnings, in feeding the bears from their porches. Then there was the fellow in Florida who was bitten while attempting to kiss a rattlesnake. Human and animal, tame and wild, crazy and sane— these people are above such trivial distinctions, no small thanks to the civilization they have also fancied transcending. A Paleolithic ancestor who attempted to feed a bear or kiss a venomous reptile would have cut short

his contributions to the gene pool; a postmodern contemporary who does the same things can count on being medevaced to the nearest facility that will accept his heath-insurance card. Book deal to follow. As a rule, liberals love Darwin, but as a matter of social policy they generally caucus on the anti-evolution side. One of the ironies of stupidity in its conservative and libertarian forms is its dogged opposition to the very safety net that stands between an imbecile and the harsher effects of natural selection. “Without all this government interference, I’d be free!” My friend, what you’d be is food. Perhaps the best current example of stupidity as a bid for transcendence is QAnon, which according to the journalist Farhad Manjoo “has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.” To subscribe to QAnon is to rise above reality-based politics and its complications. No need to fiddle with numbers or be frustrated by nuance. No need, in the course of a rational argument, to give some figurative devil his due. You’re doing battle with the devil himself, with him and his pedophilic minions, and no authority on earth can call you to account. You answer only to Jesus Christ and Donald Trump, secure in the knowledge that they can never disagree or even, in the latter case, be voted out of office in a fair election. Lately one hears any number of justified complaints about “losing our democracy,” though what some of the complainants fail to emphasize is the degree to which democracy is about losing: election after election, verdict after verdict, gain after gain. Loss is what adherents of an outfit like QAnon hope to transcend. They long for the ultimate victory, the final score, the metamorphosis from chumps to Trumps, to winners who can never lose.

ESSAY

I decided I ought to learn more about transcendence by borrowing several books on the subject from the library. The books were dense, abstract, and a bit dull. After only a few hours I wanted to transcend them. I hadn’t learned much for my essay, but I’d found another illustration of its central thesis. I’d located another instance of the need to “rise above” whatever one finds too daunting to bear. Do you remember that overwhelming sense in your first days of college—if you went to college and if the college you went to was worthy of your attendance—that all your professors and many of your classmates were so much smarter than you? To be willingly humbled by one’s own ignorance is not for the fainthearted, is not in fact for most of us, which may be part of what T. S. Eliot meant when he said that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Becoming sophomoric is a time-honored cure for the embarrassment of feeling like a freshman. One opts for stupidity in the hope of never having to feel stupid again.

t’s possible that our perception of stupidity varies in relation to the power of the perceived dimwit. When power becomes disproportionate to a creature’s level of intelligence or its sphere of reasonable entitlement, that creature starts to look stupid. A chicken doesn’t look stupid pecking around a barnyard but would look— and in effect become—terrifyingly stupid pecking at the controls of a nuclear power plant. Donald Trump would probably not have seemed all that stupid if his “very, very large brain” had been devoted to running a very, very small ice cream stand. In a society where the most ordinary of mortals is able to fly over continents with the insouciance of a god, operate an SUV the size of a mausoleum, address his inchoate musings to an audience of ten thousand followers, and wield a weapon with the firepower of the Alamo, the potential for looking and actually being stupid is enormous—even as that same lavishly equipped mortal lacks any guarantee that his duly certified ballot won’t be thrown into limbo by an online hoax or a presidential lie. Which is the other side of stupidity’s disproportion: when someone’s power

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

is less than what her intelligence or civic status would merit. I was surprised and then not surprised to discover that one of my dictionary’s definitions of stupid is “worthless.” We might with justice pause for a moment’s self-pity, positioned as we are in a society that sets us up to be stupid, that apportions us the technical power of wizards and the political power of dandelion fluff. Or if we imagine ourselves above selfpity, we might at least pity those who seek to transcend an enforced stupidity by embracing it. Oppressed groups have been known to make a tactic out of adopting the names and stereotypes by which they’ve been denigrated, so that, for example, a certain feminist cachet can attach itself to a woman who calls herself a bitch, a slut, a dyke, and so on. Call me a name, and I’ll shut you up by owning it. Treat me like I’m stupid, and I’ll show you stupidity like you wouldn’t believe. Any thought for my selfinterest becomes the sacrifice I make to restore my self-respect. More than one author has averred that it is impossible to fight stupidity. The contemporary philosopher Avital Ronell writes of the “temptation . . . to wage war on stupidity as if it were a vanquishable object.” She quotes Flaubert: “Stupidity is something unshakable. Nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it”—a cautionary note to those who would wage war on the MAGA mindset. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the most helpful here when he writes that “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.” He adds that “in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.” Many people, including most religious people, would reverse the sequence, but here is one of the religious heroes of the past century putting external liberation first. That is hardly consoling. Is it even possible to liberate a society so that an individual’s power exists in some meaningful proportion to her intelligence and entitlements, and in proper balance with the power of other persons and the finite resources of the planet? The activist Peter Maurin envisioned a society in which “it is easier for people to be good”; dare we hope for a society in which it would be harder for them to be dumb? Mar-

shall McLuhan spoke of a society in which human beings become “the sex organs of the machine world”; dare I admit my preference for a society that doesn’t destine me to be a dickhead? I need to be careful here. I imposed two strictures on myself when I began this essay: I couldn’t say that capitalism is making us stupid, and I couldn’t say that digital addiction is making us stupid, if only because it would sound pretty stupid to imply that in our present context there’s any clear distinction between the two. (Few things can take the strength from my knees like a liberation movement with a Facebook page.) Still, I can’t help quoting Bernard Stiegler’s self-evident observation that “in the Western industrial world . . . democracy has given way—and has done for quite some time—to consumerism,” which is “based on the liquidation of maturity . . . or in other words: based on the reign of stupidity, and of what so often accompanies it, namely cowardice and viciousness.” Like, for instance, trolling election officials with the aid of a “smart” device and threatening from the safe anonymity of cyberspace to rape their mothers. There is compelling evidence to suggest that our better emotions result from neural processes that the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio characterizes as “inherently slow” (how ironic that we use “slow” as a synonym for “stupid”) and that our empathy decreases the more distracted we become. In light of such findings, might we bring our supposedly scientific minds to question the wisdom of abandoning our politics to modes of communicative distraction that, like pre-political life as described by Thomas Hobbes, tend to be nasty, brutish, and short? If we accept that stupidity comes from a loss of reality, and if we acknowledge that reality asserts itself most reliably through that creative interplay of mind and matter called work, then might one step toward our liberation from collective stupidity be a militant insistence on full, remunerative, and purposeful employment, the lack of which accounts for much of the simmering grievance that demagogues like Trump feed on? (If we could see the complete work histories of half the sadsack insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol last Epiphany, we’d have a more illuminating epiphany than most of us

deserve.) Marx located the origins of modern stupidity in a system of production that alienated workers from their tools and turned them into tools themselves. Is it possible to return the tools to their hands and to their rightful possession? The deniers of reality are always the first to call such a project “entirely unrealistic”—and perhaps it is, if only because their numb certainty makes it so. If we cannot fight stupidity or its causes, we can at least try not to be stupid ourselves. We can reject the cant that passes for conviction and the cynicism that stupid people believe makes them wise. Trocmé did not tune his actions to the stupidity of Vichy policemen. He is said to have exhorted his congregation to make “little moves” against destructiveness— this from someone who saw stupidity as a prime mover in human affairs yet still managed the “little move” of joining with his neighbors to rescue thousands of Jews, most of them children, from the Nazis. The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, much less knowledge or information. The opposite of stupidity is faith. Not necessarily religious faith, which in the common parlance of “belief” is not even faith in the ancient Hebraic sense. In Hebrew, faith (emunah) is something you live, often against stupefying odds. At first glance, faith might look like stupidity, because it too seeks a kind of transcendence, but through engaging with reality rather than denying it. “If I wish to preserve myself in faith,” Kierkegaard writes, I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.

Objective uncertainty: How about the likelihood that the curse of white supremacy will ever be lifted from our land? Yet in the months following the murder of George Floyd, people of conscience, black and white, believers and nonbelievers, took their stand above seventy thousand fathoms of hatred and stupidity in order to enact their faith. Many of the protesters were young and, being young, bound to do a thing or two that an older person might call ill-advised. But stupid they could never be. Q

ESSAY

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SOLUTION TO THE AUGUST PUZZLE

NOTES FOR “SIXES AND SEVENS (AND TWELVES)”: Note: * indicates an anagram. ACROSS: 11. [yo]u’re-a; 12. [s]tray; 28. kn[if]e-E.; 29. *. DOWN: 2. first letters; 7. 1-Rene; 9. Ga.-s’up; 23. palindrome; 24. R.(ace)R.; 26. two mngs.

C A T S C A N M A D A M

L U R E H D R A C U L A

O R A T I O N R A C E R

V I Y A M P E R E T S T

E C C E N T R I C I T Y

R L O N E S T A L L E R

R E D E Y E D G A E L A

I N D I S C R E T I O N

D U N D W E E B S K P O

I R E N E A D O R N E D

N E S T E G G N M E R E

G A S U P R E D R E S S

SIX-LETTER WORDS: a) Marty-r (31A); b) a-D-opts (17A); c) rid[d]ing (5A); d) a-MP-ere (14D); e) dweebs* (15D); f) clover* (1A); g) eclats* (25A); h) an-odes (32A); i) Ae(ne[w])id* (14A); j) t[rying]-aller (21D); k) dr-edge (22A). SEVEN-LETTER WORDS: a) Dracula* (18D); b) oddness, pun (13A); c) re-dress (20D); d) auricle, homophone (10A); e) Cats-can (1D); f) red-([champagn]e)-yed (5D); g) E(lope)Rs (30A); h) oration* (3D); i) ductile, homophone (27A); j) ador(n)ed (19D); k) ne(steg, rev.)g (8D). TWELVE-LETTER WORDS: a) indiscretion* (6D); b) ec(cent)ri*-city (4D); c) ma-rriage-bond*. (23A); d) chimneys-weep (16A).

THE BOOK OF BREEZES By Chris Nealon

Then your curiosity returns to you Just a little wet with tears I welcome it home since I’ve been wondering— At evening—what is violet saying?— It speaks to the part of me that wants it both ways Dim light, square piles, The prospect of this pen scratching— And on the other hand, how do we defeat the vampires I think Kent Monkman gets it From out of the tempest a wash of color brings the dawn in Resurgence of the People Feather-light and obdurate The ache could break you but it’s also comic Caliban and Trinculo, sharing a blanket, looking like one animal, Is that what you wear to the great arrival? High heels—broken shackles— X

Well she said if you put it in a pot you have to water it Referring I think to poetic form I am a little proud of these petunias And though I imagine I prefer the wilderness to gardens I know it’s just the wishful thinking of the suburbanite Good morning, weeping cherry I do still think my favorite kind of line is long, The flung arm of a dancer, Maybe dancing for Kyle Abraham, Trained to let the fingertip release what was launched in the hip, Saying, Godspeed, don’t you worry about me—

Chris Nealon is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection The Shore.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

But lately it’s stately, Like you’re hoarding the phonemes in case of disaster— I stepped away for a second to rummage in the sounds and the sounds became an hour Hey now, says the river birch, I may not sway each day but you don’t have to tend me No! I cry— But it’s already happened, It wasn’t even poetry— Godspeed, you blurt And off goes your child X

Early mornings by the circle window Thumbing through that journal Your writing is a wash I mean a wash of movement, Ascenders and descenders— You flip back through memory in your funny scrawl, It’s spidery and overeager but it has integrity, A child’s sense that maybe ten degrees is a good tilt for the hand, That knot of education down in the muscle, carrying the thoughts along, Or rhythms—is this humming? Woodsmen hum—you play with duration, Matching it with vowels pealing— April had a higher ceiling I mean more assonance than average—a tilt of maybe ten degrees— Like your funny angle on America, built on westbound flights with headphones on— Relief from paranoia brought by aeriality and melody— Here comes Gregory—or there he goes— Keening his outro high above the place the tune took in the body of the song, That end-of-the-novel feeling, no, don’t go! Rue du Départ— Pam—we’re scattered now and long past education— “Way over yonder in the minor key,” remember how you used to hear it as “the monarchy”? What a wonderful invention— The blurring, not the king— And what a beautiful word, yonder

POETRY

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WOMEN CORINNE DOES NOT ACTUALLY KNOW By Rebecca Makkai

THE PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY

n the small Southern town where Corinne has rented an apartment for the summer, she has found a yoga studio. It’s quainter than her usual one in Boston. At home, the women are lasered and sanded, the leggings sleek, the yoga competitive. To this place, which is above a tech-help center, people wear cargo shorts and baggy T-shirts. They pay by leaving cash or a personal check in a basket, register by signing a spiral notebook. They say oof as they bend. Corinne always unrolls her mat in the back corner, tries not to interlope. The archaeology professor is the only other woman in actual yoga pants. She can lift her leg by her ear. Her hair is long and red and curly. By Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novel The Great Believers, which was awarded the Carnegie Medal.

eavesdropping, Corinne has learned that she teaches at the college, that her husband teaches chemistry there, but they’re divorcing. Corinne has questions. About whether tenure and the job market will mean this woman and her ex will continue living in this same small town the rest of their lives. Whether, when they begin dating again, they’ll each necessarily date people the other knows. There’s only one nice restaurant here, and Corinne can picture the scene: this woman waiting in the

You Were Always On My Mind (detail), by Amy Cutler © The artist Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York City; Heather Podesta Collection

entry for her date, and meanwhile there’s the ex inside with his, leaning over a candle, his fork in her spaghetti. Corinne knows only a few things about this woman—it took a while even to catch her name— but she can conjure a full life for her: a book-lined apartment, wine with her friend the women’s studies chair, a cat, student trips every two years to Israel or Greece. Corinne can’t imagine as much about the women back in Boston who apply makeup before yoga, or about the women here whose clothes are stained from lawn mowing. (She acknowledges that this is snobbery, in both cases.) There’s something about the archaeology professor that has captured her attention, something that makes Corinne look for her in every class, makes her watch as she heads off in her Subaru. It’s by eavesdropping on this woman that Corinne learns about the town’s

FICTION

current scandal: the soccer goalie at the college, the visiting high school student he sexually assaulted, the sudden national spotlight. It’s also from eavesdropping that Corinne knows enrollment at the college is down, and the new president is unpopular, and there was racist graffiti in a dorm laundry room, but probably from a townie. The others in the class seem to use this woman as their pipeline for all university-related news. Mostly, they ask about the soccer goalie assault. She hears the professor say, “At least she came forward, and fast. So often, they just never come forward.” She sees the archaeology professor at the grocery store, the library, but the archaeology professor shows no sign of recognizing Corinne. Corinne wonders if she has a crush on the woman, but no: She has simply noticed her, and in a summer devoid of other entertainment, the professor has become a celebrity. Deities, royalty, actors—none of these are in Corinne’s world right now, and so a primal sliver of her brain has mythologized this woman, her Arthurian hair. In her short time here, Corinne has felt less and less like herself. She wakes in her rented basement apartment and nothing she sees is hers. She walks around town and no one is hers. There’s no mirror in the apartment, which at first was an inconvenience and now feels oddly liberating. She realizes she has seen the professor’s face, in the past weeks, more often than her own. She reaches up one day to adjust her ponytail and is surprised to find her hair thin and smooth rather than wild and curly. Something has shaken loose. Corinne would love to introduce herself, to have a friend in town, but even two weeks into her twomonth stay, it’s too late. She’d have no patience for small talk when she’s already imagined so much of this woman’s life; and she has no desire, either, to detail her backstory, her whole existence. Here for research. The university archives. A nineteenth-century environmentalist; have you heard of him? No, it’s boring. Eight weeks. A private foundation, actually. Yes, two boys, they’re in camp. Yes, the mountains are lovely.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

THE WIFE OF THE BOY WHO RAPED HER

ack home, Corinne was never tempted to look the boy up. It crossed her mind occasionally, and each time she’d felt a wave first of revulsion—and then of pride in not needing to know. She’d thought of asking her husband to look him up. But her husband, after she told him years ago about the rape, has never brought it up, and she’s afraid that if she mentions it he’ll look at her blankly. That would be worse than anything. Here, though, there’s time and there’s emptiness and she has the urge to feel things. She starts by googling the goalie case, just out of curiosity, just to see the face of the kid everyone’s talking about. The assault happened a year and a half ago, but the trial is happening now. Before long she’s googled the man who was the boy and wound up on her small, hard bed staring at Elise’s photos. According to Facebook, this woman named Elise lives in Tampa with three children—two girls and a boy—plus the boy himself, who is now a man. His face has bloated, but just the face. Alcoholism? His account is either private or inactive, just a profile picture and a background photo of a sunset, and something about a fundraiser from five years ago. Hers, on the other hand, is a seemingly endless timeline: a decade of insipid daily life. Elise’s job seems corporate, the kind Corinne doesn’t care about. The boy is, of all things, a doctor, a podiatrist. His online reviews are mostly positive. As much as Corinne knows rape is rape is rape: if the rape had been a violent one, she’d already have contacted Elise. As things stand, she’s only thought about the shadow account she might create, the message she might send from there. One night, three weeks into her stay in the small town, she opens an empty Word document. She tells herself that she can write a note but not send it, that since she’s not seeing her shrink this summer she should do a cathartic thing. I knew your husband in college, she starts, but deletes that and begins again, talking only about herself. I’m a stranger, she starts, but I need to tell

you a story. She writes about her college without naming it yet, writes about being five states from home. She won’t mention Kyle until she has won this woman’s sympathy. Eventually, she mentions the party, names the frat and the school. Someone had roofied the punch bowl, I learned later. Like in a bad movie. But probably not Kyle, who was a freshman and not yet a member of the house. For the most part, she tells it the way she remembers it, which is to say, not at all. My roommate saw us leave together. I was at the party, and then it was morning and I was naked in my bed, and everything hurt. My head, and also everything else. Elise runs half-marathons. This prejudices Corinne against her. Not because she disapproves, but because the kind of person who works a corporate job and runs half-marathons is not the kind of person Corinne knows. If Elise worked in the humanities, if Elise had posted photos of herself and friends with cocktails, if Elise posted political things, Corinne might feel some kinship. But it’s all race photos, and the whole family dressed for Easter in lavender and navy blue. Cursive quotations about how mothers are made of steel, about not letting worries get you down. There was cooked white rice all over the floor of my room. I never figured out why. If Corinne felt she and Elise were similar, she might send the letter with the best of intentions, in sisterhood. But part of her wants to reach out for the worst reasons: To cause this woman pain. To tear her marriage apart. To make her see that the world is a bad place and the man she married was a terrible boy, whether or not he’s a terrible man. Which is why she will never let herself reach out. My roommate said, “Don’t you dare touch her. She’s too drunk.” And later, when she met him in the hallway leaving our room, he said, “I didn’t follow your advice.” And he shrugged, my roommate said, and smiled and clucked his tongue. It’s important that you know he shrugged. She saves the file. Every few days, she goes in and looks at it, revises it. Just glancing at her closed computer, sleeping on her desk, gives her an adrenaline rush.

HER FRIEND’S EX

er friend George once told her about a woman he dated in his twenties. The woman wanted to be pinned down every time they had sex. Not for part of the time—the whole time. He had to pretend to be assaulting her. If he kissed her or tried to make her feel good or let go of her arm, the moment was lost and she’d get up, put her underwear back on, start answering emails. The night he said all this, years ago, George had been overserved and was a little sloppy. Corinne has thought about it several times a week ever since, and not luridly but with genuine curiosity: What was it about this woman that made her own agency such a turnoff? She asked George, because she was drunk, too, if this had made him happy. “It made me happy to make her happy,” he said. “But ultimately, it was why we broke up.” When she asked what he meant, he flushed, sat up straighter, seemed suddenly aware that he was alone in a bar with a female friend, talking about sex. “I couldn’t live with that forever,” he said, “with only that, forever. Plus, like . . . it was hard work. Physically.” Then he changed the subject. A couple of times since then, Corinne has gone through George’s Facebook friends looking for the woman, whose name she never learned. She looks for women around George’s age, ones you’d never suspect it of. Or, well, the ones you actually would suspect it of, the women who run corporations, the senior partners at law firms. She looks for women who somehow match George, his dark curls, his always-startled eyes. And then she looks for women with hard faces, light hair: George’s polar opposite. When Corinne stands, she prefers to lean on a wall or to jut one hip out as far as her joints will go. She likes to feel limits, and she imagines this woman is the same. She thinks now of looking through George’s Facebook again, seeing who’s against a brick wall, who’s sitting with her legs double-crossed. She has a dream, one night in early July, that George introduces her to this woman, and it’s the archaeology pro-

fessor. And Corinne says, “I should have known.” And the woman says, “You should have known.” THE SINGER HER HUSBAND KEEPS PICTURES OF

ack in the spring, she needed to get camp forms for the boys off Wallace’s computer. She clicked a file icon on his desktop and found the photos. She wasn’t sure who the woman was, but grew certain it was no one Wallace knew in real life, certain the pictures hadn’t been sent to him personally. Highly filtered shots, the woman’s caramel ass professionally lit. The woman sucked a lollipop, or licked her lips, or covered her nipples with two fingers of each hand. Corinne looked up the actress she thought it might be, but she was wrong. Two weeks later, the singer performed on Saturday Night Live, and Corinne recognized her. “Do you like her?” she asked Wallace. Wallace laughed. “She’s a bit much,” he said. Then he said, “I actually met her a few months ago. When we were doing the Fun Run thing.” Wallace was involved in organizing his company’s charity outing, a deal with minor celebrities. “Kind of a diva.” That night, Corinne checked when he’d saved the photos. Some right before the Fun Run, some right after, a bunch more six weeks later. Why he needed to save them, rather than simply whack off to Google results, Corinne couldn’t imagine. Well, maybe she could: A Google search would bring up the singer with her boyfriend, the singer as a baby, the singer caught on the street with no makeup. Wallace’s album was curated, flawless. The singer was always alone. Corinne was not concerned for a second that something had happened between the singer and Wallace. She almost wished she could imagine that. But instead, the whole thing made Wallace seem pathetic, a sad little man. She imagined him gazing at her from across the Fun Run tent, the singer in tiny shorts. She imagined him shaking her hand with a wet palm, asking if he could get her more water, close enough to smell what Corinne felt certain was vanilla-tinged perfume.

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She spent an hour that same night reading everything she could about the singer. The singer had been married three times, never longer than a year. The singer was a vegan who occasionally ate bacon. The singer was discovered at age twelve in a talent competition at Disneyland. Or maybe the prize was to perform at Disneyland. It wasn’t clear. In July, sitting on her bed in the basement apartment, she checks the singer’s Twitter account. Her tweets are predictably asinine. Believe it or not, one of them reads, I’ve always had a low self of steam. But you’re my champions! Corinne can think of nothing to do but to like the post in order to grant herself the satisfaction of then unliking it, of clicking the little heart to turn it from red to clear. THE PROFESSOR OF

ARCHAEOLOGY, AGAIN

ne day in late July, in a forward fold, looking back between her own ankles, it occurs to Corinne that what fascinates her—actually, what fascinates her about her own fascination—is that she finds the archaeology professor neither beautiful nor ugly. This is rare. Her own internalized misogyny is such that she feels rage, conscious or subconscious, toward any woman she deems more beautiful than herself. She wants to see those women fail, wants them punished for their beauty. (With age, with ugliness, with stupidity.) And any woman less attractive than herself—older, boxier, more awkward, worse teeth—she feels pity for. An angry, vindictive pity. She’s simultaneously the wicked queen, wishing death on Snow White, and Snow White, revolted at the old hag. This judgment doesn’t usually occur in her rational brain—just in her guts. But she started, a few years ago, trying to recognize the stray flecks of her own racism, and now she’s trying to call out her misogyny too. She’s aware that there are men in the world, men with theories about females, who would call this cattiness, who would say it’s about evolution and competition. But good god, it’s not. She learned this rage from magazines,

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

from TV, from her own mother. She learned to hate the female body, her own and all others, from a movie she watched, way too young, where nerdy college boys secretly film the girls who’ve rejected them. The boys were meant to be the heroes. She learned it from beer ads and music videos and ballet teachers and from a world where you were harassed on the street for looking good and harassed online for not looking good. It’s only strangers she judges this way. When she knows a woman, she sees her as human. But when she doesn’t, she slips so easily into seeing her the way the world does, which is to say the way men do, which is to say as an object. When a woman once was beautiful and now is not, but is still trying very hard to look young, that’s when her misogyny roars loudest. The women whose foreheads don’t move, the women still wrapping their aging bodies like sausages. That actress, her lips pumped and stretched till her face looks raw and vaginal. She hates them, wants to laugh at them, wants, when she googles them, to find worse and worse photos. Wants, eventually, worms crawling out of their eyeholes, their spackled lips to crack to blood. Not really. But on the deepest level. Corinne thinks all this while she’s still folded over. The archaeology professor, folded over too, tucks her hands neatly under the soles of her feet. THE GIRL IN THE COFFEE SHOP

orinne does most of her work at the library, which holds, after all, the archives of the nineteenth-century environmentalist she came down here to research. But the air in the library is dry and cold, and the archives close at 4:30, and there’s a coffee shop in town with ratty leather couches, crust at the window edges. There’s a heat wave, but if she sits right in the stream of the small AC unit it’s fine. She should be indexing her research, or at least writing more grants, but instead she’s searching the boys’ camp news feed for photos that prove they’re alive, smiling, tanned. The girl wears a sweatshirt from the college volleyball team; she must

have stayed here for a summer job. She sits with a boy who keeps grabbing her phone, going through her photos, asking Who’s this? Who’s that guy? He looks short. He looks like a short douchebag. What’s his name? Then he starts looking through her messages. The girl does that uncomfortable giggle, that involuntary laughspasm Corinne has tried so hard to train out of herself. “I’m deleting this guy,” he says. The girl says Stop! and she means it, but—maybe because she whines it, rather than screaming—the boy does not stop. Not that she should have to scream. The girl tries to grab her phone back. THE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT

he high school student who was assaulted by the goalie has testified against him in court, and the world has noticed. Locally, it’s been in the papers for a while; but then Corinne was not a local until this summer. The girl’s face has not been shown, she has not been doxxed, but her testimony has been made public. The girl had not been drinking, but the boy and his friends had tricked her into eating four pot gummies. Maybe it was still a joke at that point: see what the high school student will do. She’d gotten woozy, gone upstairs in the frat house to lie down. She woke up with him on top of her, and said it was like one of those dreams where you wake halfway up and try to move, but your body, still asleep, won’t budge. You try to scream, and nothing comes out. The boy claims that he didn’t know she was a minor. He also claims it was consensual. There’s far more legal precedent in cases involving alcohol. Corinne watches the recap of the testimony at a small bar in town, a wood-paneled room where locals keep personalized steins on hooks. At 4 pm, she and an older couple clad in Harley-Davidson gear are the only ones in the place. She orders a glass of pinot grigio and wonders if it’s been poured from the same bottle as the last glass she had here, a week ago.

According to the news, it came up in court that the girl “had shaved her pubic area” before the party. The male defense attorney grilled her about why she would do that if she hadn’t gone to the party wanting and expecting sex. The female news anchor reads snippets of the transcript with barely concealed rage. The defense attorney asked if the girl was on birth control. He asked if she’d taken a pill the very day of the party. Corinne wants to smash the TV. The female half of the Harley couple shakes her head, says, “Well there you go, right there. There you go.” THE WIFE OF THE MAN SHE’S SLEEPING WITH

hildishly, Corinne hates her. She hates her long black hair, her long neck, her beautiful friends always leaning on her in photos. She was the first of Corinne’s online wormholes. The woman’s social pages; the website for her consulting firm; her wedding announcement, now ten years old. She hadn’t searched for her in quite a while, but one day in the archive room early in August, tired of the boxes of cursive correspondence (the summer is messing up her back, messing up her eyes), Corinne opens her computer and first looks again at the hypothetical email to Elise. I’m a stranger. I need to tell you a story. She googles Elise, to see what else she can find. She’s still wearing her white gloves when she keys the letters in. Lots of mentions on official race pages. Times that mean nothing to Corinne. A LinkedIn profile she can’t see for free. And because she’s already down the internet hatch, and because Elise’s life is not that interesting, she ends up googling the wife. She’s a dermatologist. The kind that injects fillers, not the kind that treats melanoma. When Corinne is with George, or when she texts him, she will not use the woman’s name. “Your wife,” she calls her. She does not want George to leave his wife, because then what would she do with him? Not marry him. Not leave her husband. It would be too much work. George would be

too much work. Everything is too much work. They didn’t get together the night that George told her about his ex, the one who needed to be restrained. But the intimacy of the conversation had surely sparked something. It happened a month later, when he drove her home from a party that Wallace had left early, claiming a headache. That was three years ago. A logic problem: She is jealous of the wife, because the wife has George. But (and she’s aware of the hypocrisy) she does not wish she were married to George, because George is the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife. (Wallace, for all his failings, would never, could never, actually make the moves that would get him there.) Ergo, she feels sorry for the wife, because the wife is married to a guy she doesn’t even really know. But the wife is happy, or at least seems happy. This happiness is wrong. Whereas Corinne, who knows the truth, and for a while there had George every Tuesday afternoon at least, is not particularly happy at all. The question is: What the hell. George has a habit of breaking her heart. As soon as Corinne starts to rely on him, or starts to admit to herself that she’s in love, George needs space. Or he simply vanishes. As soon as her heart grows another defensive layer, he’s back. Corinne thought that getting here, getting away from him for two months, would bring her back to herself. Or, no: By August, she realizes that what she really wanted, all along, was for him to come after her. To show up at the doorstep of her basement apartment, to spend a night, two nights, a week. He texts her like her husband does, anodyne things: Tell me something good. Hope you’re having a good day. Yes, all great here. She wanted distance, but she didn’t want this. When she’s angry with George, which is frequently, she thinks that one day she’ll write the wife an anonymous letter, on actual paper, and mail it from another city. She’ll tell, not about herself, but about the woman George slept with at work, the woman he saw for a while a few years ago, the friend of the wife’s whom he kissed, drunk, at a party in his own house. Just get yourself tested,

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she’ll write. I say this in friendship. Of course that part will not be true. That summer, at the bottom of an old document full of useless research, she drafts this note too, an addition to her collection of notes she’ll never send. Here is the wife’s website: Botox, Restylane, Juvéderm, dermaplaning. Here she is, not exceptionally beautiful, but her face has a sheen, and her lips are full, and unless the photo has been retouched, the skin on her neck isn’t doing the horrifying things Corinne’s is. Corinne knows plenty of things about the wife, many of them unflattering. She knows that the wife takes five-hour baths, that she eats salad with her fingers, leaf by leaf, that the wife, a virgin at twenty-three when she and George met, had had a misunderstanding of the term blowjob. Corinne’s shrink says her hatred of the wife is misplaced self-hatred, sublimated guilt. Corinne doesn’t disagree. Corinne has declined her therapist’s offer of phone sessions over the summer, and it’s probably a bad idea, but strangely, Corinne has found herself articulating things more clearly in her own head. Without a shrink to save it all up for, she has to think each thought all the way through on her own. She looks up pricing for some of the services the wife offers. Eight hundred dollars for fillers that last six months. Five hundred dollars for a laser treatment. The before and after pictures are impressive, if they’re real. Faces smoothed as if ironed, skin brightened until it looks—well, burned, yes, but also younger. Before, after. Before, after. Before, after. Corinne could click all day. Back in April, George told Corinne that he and his wife would be at a protest in front of the federal building in Boston. Corinne told him she was planning to be there herself, although it wasn’t true till that moment. It was a small enough protest that when she showed up, she spotted them easily. George held his young son on his shoulders. The wife seemed to know half the people there. This was when Corinne knew she needed to get out of town. She didn’t recognize herself, this crazed woman in the crowd.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

Even now, she’s not sure what she was there for. Certainly not to say something. That’s a fantasy she’d never act on. She supposes she was there to observe, to gather information. Not for any use, but to scratch some kind of itch. To think to herself: This is her. This is the way she moves. This is how her voice sounds, louder than you’d think. This is how she walks through the world. Look at her beautiful shoes. THE GIRL IN THE COFFEE SHOP, AGAIN

he young couple is back, and Corinne watches them study side by side. The girl gets up to head to the restroom, and the boy says, “Leave your phone here.” “What? Why?” “So I know you aren’t sexting anyone.” The girl says, “You’re ridiculous.” “Why would you need your phone in the bathroom?” She says, “I’ll leave it here, but I’m locking it.” “Why would you need to lock it?” The girl throws her phone at the boy, and he puts it facedown in front of him. Corinne writes a note on a library slip from her purse, and waits outside the bathroom door. That kid is an ass, the note says. This is how the bad stuff starts. When the girl emerges, she hands her the note. She worries the girl will show the note to the boy, that they’ll both laugh at her, but she takes a moment before entering the bathroom herself, and when she glances back, the girl is stuffing the note in her pocket. Corinne is proud of herself for a few hours, and then wonders why she didn’t say something aloud, didn’t confront this boy. She likes to believe that if she’d seen, for instance, one kid telling another to go back to Pakistan, she’d have intervened at full volume. She’d have made a scene. But for women, no: whispers, notes. THE DAUGHTER OF THE BOY WHO RAPED HER

s the summer progresses, as the apartment accumulates layers of junk, Corinne spends more time inside her computer. She clicks back and forth between Twitter and

Facebook, waiting for something interesting to happen. She digs through emails she failed to answer last year. One night, she dreams she has tricked her husband by filling a piñata with all their wedding china, then asking him to smash it. It’s his birthday party, and when the piñata falls to the ground, when the shards of china spill out, he looks utterly betrayed. In the dream, Corinne laughs; but when she wakes up, her stomach roils with acid. She numbs herself by lying in bed and staring at her phone, and for some reason this is the morning she thinks to try the boy’s last name, an unusual one, on Instagram. He isn’t there, and his wife isn’t there, but here’s his oldest daughter, who looks about fourteen, too young to have a public account like this, too young to post these photos of herself in a bikini. Corinne wonders if her mother knows, wonders if she should screenshot the account and send it, anonymously, to Elise. But no, no, no, no. How is it possible that she’s thinking of ratting out a teenage girl for showing skin, but not the father for committing rape? Well. She knows how it’s possible. THE WIFE OF THE NINETEENTHCENTURY ENVIRONMENTALIST

er name was Mae, and she pops up often in Corinne’s research, although this is not what she’s there to learn, not what her grant is for. Mae was, herself, an herbalist. Mae’s maid, Annunziata, an Italian immigrant, was arrested in 1892 after her husband died from ingesting the oil of bitter almonds, which Annunziata had given him as medicine. Annunziata claimed she’d thought it was the oil of sweet almonds, a harmless drug, that she’d miscommunicated with the druggist in her imperfect English, that the druggist was the one who should be tried. The story upsets Corinne, particularly the version of it in which Annunziata loved her husband and unknowingly gave him something deadly. The better version: he was an abusive man, and Mae told Annunziata what to do. What other justice

was available, in that shadowy time? What justice is ever on offer? Annunziata remained in the household through old age. THE NEWS ANCHOR

he’s seething, talking about how the judge has handed the goalie only a three-month sentence. Three months in the county jail, two years of probation. This is not an opinion show, this is a newscast, and she is meant to report the news. Corinne guesses she has opinions and information about pubic hair, about birth control pills, about incapacitation, about the male defense attorney, the male judge. Corinne likes this anchor. A local anchor, one she’s known only since she came down here. Corinne remembers someone telling her that since anchors have to buy their own clothes, the women nearly go broke buying bright jacket after jewel-tone blouse. They can never repeat an outfit. The men just cycle the same five jackets and shirts. The boy has been expelled from the college, but people have raised money online to “help him land on his feet.” Corinne watches the anchor clench and unclench her left hand, her nails perfectly manicured and pink. The nails cost money, too. THE ARCHAEOLOGY PROFESSOR, AGAIN

orinne spots her at the farmers market that sets up every Saturday morning at the entrance of the town’s small botanical garden. Corinne is not there to shop—her apartment has only the tiniest stove, so what would she do with onions and collards and baby potatoes?—but when she spies the professor, her arms laden with canvas bags, Corinne sticks around and buys some flowers. The professor is looking at zucchini, she’s taking a sample of cheese. The seam rips on one of her bags, and smaller paper bags fall out of it, onto the sidewalk. Blueberries roll. Corinne wants to help, but she’s stuck to the spot. The professor is down on her knees, scooping everything back up, looking like she wants to cry. Corinne has never seen her not serene, never seen her not

look fundamentally yogic. She looks, right now, like this is the fifteenth such thing to happen to her today, like she’s a centimeter away from utter disaster and despair. Corinne resolves that the next time she’s at the yoga studio, she’ll secretly pay for the professor’s next class pack. But then, on Monday at the studio, she’s suddenly too shy to approach the desk with this strange request. Surely everyone here knows the professor. And no one knows her. And so she does nothing. But she thought it, and for a while the thought makes her feel good.

THE

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RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE

THE WOMEN IN THE BONDAGE FILMS

t’s the only porn Corinne wants to watch now. Women tied up, enjoying it against their will. Devices, whips, multiple men, strange rope configurations, gags. She needs to believe the films were ethically made, needs to believe that if one of these women were ever in true distress, she’d know it, she’d see it in her face. (And then what would she do? Call the police? This one woman in porn looks really sad.) She wants no men to watch these videos, ever. She wants no teenage boys to think this is how it works. She does not, of course, want to be grabbed off the streets and put in a dungeon and given rope burns. She does not want to be the women in the videos, and she does not want to be the men in the videos, nor does she want to be another woman in the videos, doing things to the tiedup woman. She wants to be here, on her bed, watching the videos. She wishes these websites could collect statistics on gender, on who watches what. Maybe they do, who knows. She wishes she could switch research fields and compile the data. She’d give people optional exit surveys, after they logged off porn sites. No personal information beyond gender and age, just Did you feel weird about this? Did you like this? Did you hate that woman? Did you love her? What she does, in the real world, is send the links to George. She’s sent him stuff before, but not like this. She’ll be home in ten days, and she’s fairly sure her absence has broken

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whatever they had. When they see each other, it will be awkward, formal. Not a mad embrace. Wasn’t that the point, though? He texts back: Is this what you want? She writes back: No. Then she writes: I think I want to be the whip. THE SELF-CARE EXPERT

orinne is in the coffee shop again, and the frumpy woman in the next seat is watching a video, a talking-head thing, on her laptop with no earphones. Back home, Corinne would complain, but here she’s constantly aware that she’s a stranger, one with a Yankee accent. And she’s not getting work done anyway. The woman in the video is a selfcare expert, and she’s talking about compartmentalization. “We can’t absorb all the bad news,” the woman says, “for all the people in the world.” The woman’s blazer is pale yellow, and she’s eerily calm, her voice a skating rink. Corinne thinks this is the worst idea she’s ever heard, this excuse for caring only about yourself and your family and people who remind you of your family. The woman recommends visualizing your mind as a series of jars with lids. She recommends dropping romantic concerns in one jar, financial concerns in another, mentally screwing on the lids. Corinne wonders if this is what has broken down for her, this summer: she has lost her compartments. Back home, chasing after kids, working, eating dinner with Wallace, meeting up with George, using her computer only for research, keeping her house organized, keeping her office organized—everything was in its place. Here, her world has become as disordered as her rented room. Everything that’s ever happened to her, everyone she’s ever known, is right there in her laptop, waiting for her to shake the mouse and bring it all to life. She’s been absorbed in her neighbor’s video for so long that she hasn’t noticed the college couple, the girl and her terrible boyfriend, entering the coffee shop. They stand in line, looking through the grimy glass at the giant pastries. They’re holding hands.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

Corinne stuffs her laptop and papers in her bag, scurries out the door before the girl sees her—unless she already has, unless this hand-holding is a demonstration for her benefit. Instead of heading to the bar for a drink, and even though she has half an open bottle at home, she buys a bottle of red wine and carries it home in her bag, where it clanks against her computer. At home, a cockroach skitters out from under the closet door, big as a mouse. Corinne manages not to scream; she flaps her hands against her legs instead, turns in a circle. She stomps her foot, but the cockroach is already gone. THE HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR

orinne has finished her open bottle and started the new one. She doesn’t remember following the singer Wallace is obsessed with, but apparently she has. Here she is, in a black strappy halter that looks like someone went at her with a roll of duct tape. She has actual tape on her mouth, a black X. She’s written: standing tall with victims of silence. What the hell is a victim of silence? In the tweet below that—Corinne has a moment of cognitive dissonance as she digests that the singer is writing about the small town Corinne is now drinking in—she’s posted an article about the rape case. The girl’s victim impact statement, but not her name, has been released. Corinne reads the statement, and it’s good. Corinne had somehow missed the fact that after the assault during her campus visit, the girl chose to come to school here anyway, spent the past year as a freshman. She thinks of the coffee shop girl, wonders if they know each other, if they’ve debated each other in class. The fact that she’d enrolled at the university was used against her. It was the best school that accepted me, the girl wrote, maybe because she knew she needed to justify it. They offered me the best scholarship package. The girl—no, the young woman, because she’s in college now, and college was when Corinne, at least, started calling herself a woman—chose to attend the university, and it wasn’t until she saw her rapist on campus that she

fell apart. This was when she sought counseling, articulated what had happened, brought charges. Corinne finds a tweet questioning the woman’s decision, if she was really so traumatized, to matriculate at the university. As opposed, Corinne writes in response, to at a rapist-free school? THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE

orinne wakes up with a construction site in her skull, her mouth bitter, the lights too bright. She finished the second bottle; she never ate dinner. She’s always remembered a recovering alcoholic who came to speak to her high school who said “I knew I had a problem when I started drinking alone. There’s never a reason to drink alone.” But he was a man. He didn’t understand that for women, drinking alone was safer. Drinking in a group was the dangerous thing. Except that with your phone in your hand, your computer next to you on your bed, you were never really alone anymore, and it slowly comes to Corinne that what she did was not a dream, it’s an actual memory, as thick and acrid as whatever’s coating her tongue. But she—what did she do? She did it backwards. She did it backwards on purpose, in some kind of drunken logic that might actually save her, or, no, save them, which wasn’t the point but suddenly felt like it. As long as she’d remembered to use a fake account. She pulls the computer into the bathroom and sits on the floor near the toilet and checks, her fingers shaking from the alcohol, and maybe from nerves too. Yes, she finds she’s still logged in to the burner account she uses to register for free seats to rallies for horrible politicians, so that those seats stay empty. On more than one occasion, she’s marveled at her ability to write lucidly, or at least to edit cleanly, when drunk. And here, look: Without typos, with the names changed, she’s taken the note she’d written about George, his other affairs, and sent it to Elise, the wife of the boy who raped her, to the email account listed on her Facebook. She’s subbed in the boy’s place of work and his occupation (at a medical convention,

she wrote, because yes, indeed, the boy is now a doctor, one whose patients seem to love him); she remembers, now, going back to the boy’s own Facebook page and finding the name of an attractive female friend he had tagged himself with at a party, and here is her name in the email (You might want to ask Debra Wenman a few questions). It should all be easily disproven. Debra Wenman might be a lesbian, might be dead, might be his cousin. The boy will, unless he’s guilty of these things, be able to plead innocence with all the conviction of actual innocence. He could take a lie-detector test. But why is she so worried about him? What she accused him of is far less terrible than what he actually did, just more recent. She’s accused the man of it, is the thing, and not the boy. For a horrible moment, it crosses her mind that she sent George’s wife the note she’d composed for Elise, that she accused George of college-era rape. But no, there’s no such email in her sent box. She checks her phone to see if she texted George, but the last message between them is still the upside-down smiley face he sent her two days ago, and she hasn’t written back. It’s the only time she feels okay: when she’s the one silent, when he’s the one waiting. It’s not lost on her that she did this drunk, and that what the boy did to her, twenty years ago, he also did drunk. A few years back, when another college rape was in the news, her friend Suzanne (no longer her friend) said the boy couldn’t be blamed for what he did intoxicated. Drinking, Corinne argued, didn’t make you act out of character. Normal people didn’t murder their wives when they were drunk; spousal abusers did that. You didn’t profess love to someone when you were drunk unless you actually loved them. “I don’t rape people when I’m drunk,” Corinne said, “no matter how attracted to them I am. Because I’m not a rapist.” But what does it make her, that in her stupor she sent this email that was a lie, that would do nothing but hurt people? It occurs to her that maybe, after the dust clears, it will bring him closer to Elise. After all, someone must be jealous of one of them, to send this note. Someone wants them

split up, and what’s more romantic than that? Corinne vomits three times. She drinks water, and throws that up too. She wonders if the panicked regret she feels over the email is part of the generalized regret she always feels when she’s hungover, the self-loathing that wants to be purged just as much as the alcohol does. Her empty stomach, so profoundly empty, feels flat for once. When she makes it back to the bed, she peels her shirt off, holds her phone up high, takes a picture of her bare torso, her chest, her neck, her face. Her face looks horrid and pale, but she fixes it with filters. She never sends George a picture that includes both her body and her face, always only one or the other, just in case, but she’s feeling reckless and self-obliterating, and she sends it. She waits to hear back, but he doesn’t respond and she falls asleep, and when she wakes again two hours have passed and he hasn’t written. She hates being the last one to hit send, hates the limbo it puts her in, wishes she could take the photo back. Before she deletes it from her phone, she stares at the picture. She looks like a corpse, her eyes closed, her body still and stiff on the white sheets. She needs her boys back from camp. She needs to be in her own house. How easy it turns out to be, to come unmoored. THE ARCHAEOLOGY PROFESSOR

t’s Corinne’s final yoga class here. The apartment is half packed, and she’s written a thank-you note to the library archivist. She wishes she could stay in this room, on this mat, forever. She’s happiest when her body is pretzeled, her legs wound together, her arms wound together, or her arm pressed tight against her thigh, or her feet clenched in her hands, or her hands clasped behind her back. She needs to feel the limits of her body, and the hardness of the floor beneath her mat. She takes time gathering her things after class, puts her blocks and strap away slowly. The archaeology professor is talking to the instructor. Corinne must have been standing

closer than she realized; when the professor turns, she seems startled by Corinne’s face right there in her own. What Corinne wants to say, and almost starts to say, as if dreaming and not in control of what comes next, is “I messed up, and I need you to forgive me.” But because she is not dreaming, because she is standing here in her bare feet on the cold wood floor, what she says is “You dropped this.” And then she can’t think what on earth she means, and the professor and the yoga instructor both look at her expectantly. But Corinne’s hand is in her sweatshirt pocket, and in this same pocket is the twenty dollars she’d been meaning to put in the class payment basket. She hands the rolled-up bill to the professor. “Oh!” the professor says, and her eyebrows go skeptical. “I did?” “You did,” Corinne says, and then she leaves before there can be another question. Tomorrow she’ll slip in the door and put another twenty in the basket. No, she’ll put fifty. That seems right. Or fifty and a note of thanks. Or fifty and a box of toffee from the place on Main Street. There must be some formula, some perfect amount that will offset her own fumbling existence, her sins. THE WOMAN IN THE SANDWICH SHOP

t’s Corinne’s last day in town, and the woman is sixty, sixty-five. She eats a salad by herself. After lunch, she carefully brushes her teeth with a dry brush, looking in a little mirror. Somehow, it is not at all disgusting. She reapplies red lipstick. She stands and stretches her calves, one at a time, takes a minute to organize her purse. She is putting herself back together. Corinne never thinks to put herself back together, never stops to think, midday, about where she is now. She’s enchanted with this woman’s self-care, her way of doing one thing at a time. The woman comes over and asks if Corinne knows the way to the botanical garden. “I think you walk straight east,” Corinne says. Instead of I’m not from here. Instead of Tell me how to live. Q

FICTION

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imone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (1949), in which she famously asserts that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” was one of the most important intellectuals in twentieth-century France. Her brilliant writings, her long relationship with the philosopher JeanPaul Sartre, their cultural significance, and their complex intimate lives make for fascinating study. It is less well known that she also wrote fiction that, in her time, garnered much praise; her 1954 novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt. INSEPAR ABLE (Ecco, $26.99) is, in this context, an exciting surprise: a previously unpublished novel written in 1954, immediately after The Mandarins and before her superb autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958). According to Margaret At-

wood, who has written a lively and inviting introduction to this slender volume, de Beauvoir “made the mistake of showing it to Sartre . . . [who] could not grasp its significance,” and “dismissed [it] as inconsequential.” De Beauvoir shelved the manuscript, even though its subject—her passionate friendship with Élisabeth Lacoin, known as Zaza, and Zaza’s tragic death at age twenty-one—is one she would address, in various guises, in no less than six literary works. Beautifully translated by Sandra Smith, Inseparable is torturously delicious and consuming in the way doomed love stories often are. When nine-year-old Sylvie Lepage, “a very good girl,” meets her new classmate Andrée Gallard, she is immediately smitten: Andrée is a little scandalous, funny, a mimic, bursting with

secrets about the teachers gleaned from her older sister. Sylvie is fascinated by the rowdy freedoms—or apparent freedoms—of Andrée’s home life, in which passels of siblings and cousins run riot under the benignly neglectful watch of Madame Gallard, Andrée’s mother. As the girls grow older, the differences between their families become more apparent, and Sylvie’s initial romantic impression of the Gallard household is tempered by a grasp of its strict Catholic faith. “Neither Papa nor the writers I admired were believers,” Sylvie records, and having lost her faith—a sin that could get one expelled from Catholic school—she feels she must “carefully hide [her] fall from grace,” even from Andrée. She also hides the intensity of her feelings for her friend, which she doubts are reciprocated. When Sylvie and Andrée get to the Sorbonne, Andrée is attracted to Sylvie’s study partner, Pascal Blondel, who, Sylvie realizes, in spite of being a man, has had similarly limited options: “He’d been educated in a religious institution where his father was a teacher, and he loved only his studies and his family.” Although Pascal is as devout as Andrée and her family, the path of their love is far from smooth. Andrée’s mother, so insouciant when her children were small, proves intrusive and controlling, committed to arranged marriages rather than love matches, and determined to keep her daughter occupied with domestic chores. Andrée, a free spirit, grows ever more high-strung and extreme, to the point of self-harm and illness, while Sylvie proves an impotent witness to her friend’s agonized decline. Andrée, like Zaza, suffers an untimely death, one that the novel makes clear is caused by the stifling dictates of the conservative Gallard family and their Catholic faith. The character of Pascal, we are informed by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir— Simone’s adopted daughter, whose illuminating afterword concludes the volume, along with a

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ichard Powers’s new novel BEWILDER MENT

brief selection of letters between Simone de Beauvoir and Élisabeth Lacoin—is based on the phenomenologi st philo s opher Mau r ice Merleau-Ponty. In its roman à clef aspect, the novel—although decidedly fiction (in her dedication to Zaza, de Beauvoir insists, “this is not truly your story but simply a story inspired by us”)—grants us insight into the preoccupations of France’s future intellectual elite during their interwar university years. The centrality of the struggle between religion and freedom in the late 1920s (de Beauvoir received her B.A. in 1928) and the degree to which adult women were subject to parental strictures may now seem surprising; but, of course, French women did not gain the right to vote until 1944, and married women in France could not open their own bank accounts or have a professional career without their husbands’ permission until as late as 1965. Brief and exuberant, Inseparable amplifies the canon of a titan of twentieth-century feminism, and reveals her in an unexpectedly tender, unguarded mode. More than that, it’s a touching iteration of the female bildungsroman. De Beauvoir evokes the landscapes, activities, and companions of her adolescence in a vivid and refreshingly unaffected way—bringing Sylvie and Andrée to life, as she hoped to do, “through literary artfulness.”

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

(W. W. Norton, $27.95), his first since The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, seeks also to convey the intensities of youth, in this case those of an idiosyncratic nineyear-old boy named Robin Byrne. Narrated by Robin’s father, Theo, a widowed astrobiologist, the novel recounts a transformative year in their lives that opens and closes with camping trips in the Great Smoky Mountains. The Byrnes live in Wisconsin, where Theo is a university professor, and Robin—bullied by his peers, often in trouble with his teachers, passionate about animals and nature, and powerfully missing his late mother, Alyssa (an animal rights activist who died in a car accident)—longs to be homeschooled, to be reunited with Alyssa, and to save the planet. Powers is a writer whose abiding concerns—such as scientific advances in the study of human nature, and the damage humans have done to the natural world—have been articulated in various forms in his twelve previous novels. These concerns have only become more pressing with time. In this case, the Byrnes live in an America reminiscent of the Trump era, in which sciencedenying politicians are determined to undermine all manner of research. Specifically, they eliminate funding for Theo’s academic project, Earthlike Planet Seeker, which searches for extraterrestrial life: The country’s ruling party would have opposed the Seeker even if it were free. Finding other Earths was a globalist plot deserving the Tower of Babel treatment. If we academic elites found that life arose all over, it wouldn’t say much for humanity’s Special Relationship with God.

They prove inimical, also, to the work of Martin Currier, a close friend of Alyssa’s who is developing a decoded neurofeedback, or DecNef, program,

which involves exposing troubled subjects to the recorded neural activity of others with desirable behaviors or attitudes. In this case, Robin, on the verge of expulsion, is repeatedly exposed to a recording Currier made of his late mother’s experience of ecstasy. The results are astonishing, and Robin transforms from a struggling, depressive, and too often rageful child into a youth of prodigious wisdom and articulacy. For Theo, who has passionately resisted drug therapy for his son, the experience is ambivalent: Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him . . . there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

Infused with Alyssa’s spirit, and apparently with some of her knowledge,

Robin is inspired by a Greta Thunberg– like character named Inga Alder to become an activist. The boy’s move into the public arena comes just as Currier’s DecNef starts to attract media attention—both in print and on television. Although Robin’s identity is supposedly obscured, it’s not long before curious journalists track down the family. Eventually, the exposure leads to problems for Currier and his experiments; and from there, the rest of the story unfolds with an inevitability that is either pleasing or dismaying, depending on your feelings about plot.

Top: “Mon Ombre,” by Gladys © The artist. Courtesy the Robin Rice Gallery, New York City. Bottom: “Showy Orchids, Jungle Trail, Cherokee Orchard, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, April 26, 1968,” by Eliot Porter © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1990.51.4697.2. Bequest of the artist

In a moving note that precedes the novel, Powers explains the importance in his own youth of reading “Flowers for Algernon,” Daniel Keyes’s short story about a man who has surgery to enhance his intelligence, only for its effects to prove temporary. He explains that the plot returned to him when he first heard about decoded neurofeedback and imagined its potential consequences. This, combined with a growing appreciation of the profound effects of the Anthropocene on young people’s psyches, led him to write Bewilderment. There are echoes, too, of The Little Prince, in chapters about diverse inhabited planets that Theo and Robin imagine visiting. Bewilderment feels, in certain respects, too familiar and tidy. Once the stakes are clear, the plot is obvious, and its mechanisms will be recognizable, along with the book’s themes, to readers of earlier Powers novels (see, for example, Generosity: An Enhancement). Characterization is not Powers’s forte. Though central to the narrative, Alyssa is a cipher whose flatness is rendered plausible only by Theo’s limited point of view. Moreover, the sketch of Theo’s personal and family history feels as thin as paper. But if Theo’s other relationships remain onedimensional, the connection between father and son has greater density and texture, as does Robin’s urgent and unbridled passion for the natural world. Unabashedly issue-driven, Bewilderment may neither challenge nor surprise, but admirers of Powers’s ability to fold near-futuristic scientific facts into a meticulously constructed plot will nonetheless find satisfaction.

hallenge and surprise are, on the other hand, essential to the Danish writer Harald Voetmann’s pungent short novel AWAKE (New Directions, $14.95). Ably translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, the book chronicles the late days of Pliny the Elder, the prolific writer, historian, and naturalist perhaps best known for having died while attempting to rescue friends from Mount Vesuvius in 79 ad. Voetmann is not so crass, however, as to center his narrative upon this familiar and terminal detail, which

emerges only through an account by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, son of his sister Plinia, and himself an author and magistrate. Rather, the book is chiefly composed, like a play, of nine scenes involving Pliny, his slave Diocles, and said nephew. Within each scene, vignettes are structured around quotations from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, his attempt at an encyclopedia of all knowledge. Taking these citations as inspiration, Voetmann—himself a

dered present and particular—as when I once saw, in a museum, a tiny bronze lantern in the shape of a monkey, sold as a souvenir at the gladiatorial games in Pompeii the way Red Sox T-shirts are now sold at Fenway Park. But the vast differences from our contemporary times are as sharply conveyed, whether in the image of the wax baby dolls fashioned by Pliny’s nurse to represent his dead siblings; or the strange and awful description of Pliny’s paid sexual encounter with a young woman without orifices; or, horrendously, the crucifixion of a runaway slave: Overripe figs fall as Echion hammers, one of the freedmen lets out an accidental chuckle as a moldy fig bursts between the wisps of red on Echion’s scalp. Echion raises his bloodstained face at him and bares his teeth.

translator of Latin texts, including works by Petronius and Juvenal— conjures incidents and meditations chiefly, though not exclusively, from Pliny’s perspective. Both the phlegmatic Pliny the Younger and the priapic and ill-fated Diocles also have their say. Pliny the Elder relates, for example, a stroll through the Gardens of Sallust in childhood: My mother bought me a little donkey made of red clay. The donkey dangled on a leather strap, it was meant as a necklace. My mother tightened the strap so that I might wear it around my wrist instead where it wouldn’t eclipse the golden orb on my chest that marked my class. The trinket seller’s skin was dark and blotchy from exposure to sun and dust. His accent was Greek, his copper hoops were green with verdigris.

In these few sentences, the concrete world of the first century ad is ren-

Eruption of Mount Vesuvius at night; people in the foreground, an aquatint by Friedrich Weber after Alessandro d’Anna. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection, London

And that’s not the half of it. Pliny the Elder—his breathing impaired, his nose frequently bleeding, his body immense and deliquescent— is revolting. The world he inhabits is bawdy and casually brutal. Women, children, and slaves are playthings for their masters; lust is as freely licensed as hunger; the body’s effluvia are frankly examined. And yet the brilliant meditations—on whether color exists in the world or in the eye, on physiognomy, on borders and borderlessness, and on suffering—seem in some instances comically obsolete and in others utterly germane. Pliny’s ambition to capture the world, all of it, at the sacrifice of sleep, rings as true today as it must have two thousand years ago. To ask whether Awake is in any traditional sense a novel seems irrelevant, just as it’s irrelevant to quibble over Anne Carson’s forms. This short book is neither pleasing, nor in any straightforward way satisfying; in places, it is wildly unpleasant. But strange as it is, Awake is original, piercing, and richly exhilarating. Voetmann’s text is a sharp reminder of how powerfully and succinctly well-chosen words can create a world, render experiences, and express thoughts—in short, transport us, to places and in ways we could not have imagined. Q

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BOSTON GOTHIC Atticus Lish’s novel of illness, masculinity, and murder By Christian Lorentzen Discussed in this essay:

The War for Gloria, by Atticus Lish. Knopf. 464 pages. $28.

he boy has talent, secret or not so secret, but he is stuck. Something—maybe alcohol, maybe orphanhood, maybe bad parents, maybe a history of abuse, maybe friends who get him into mischief—has been holding him back. There is a beautiful world out there that could be his, and a beautiful woman too. It might be as simple as moving across the river or as grand as heading west. First he needs to heal, and he needs to try to heal. And t here a re t h i n gs, people—maybe his best friend—that he’ll have to renounce. Most of all he needs to get out of town, a town full of deadbeats, crooks, snitches, and jerkoffs, not to mention child molesters, wife beaters, thieves, and murderers. If he doesn’t get out, he’ll end up cracking rocks on a construction site, working at the airport, in law enforcement and on the take, or just dead. The town is Boston, and the boy or man-child I’m describing could be, with variations and inversions, the Christian Lorentzen’s most recent article for Harper’s Magazine, “Literature After Trump,” appeared in the February 2021 issue.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

protagonist of any number of movies set there in the past twenty-five years: Matt Damon’s Will in Good Will

Hunting; Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy in The Departed; Ben Affleck’s Doug in The Town; Casey Affleck’s Lee in Manchester by the Sea. You’ve probably seen these films, or perhaps parodies of

them. They have congealed into a genre. Boston, with its mix of Brahmins, university-affiliated elites, yuppies, and white ethnic working stiffs (Irish and Italians) makes a plausible backdrop for interclass dramas that accommodate mostly white casts. These characters inhabit a city transitioning from a culture of honor and religion to one of therapy and meritocracy. Call it moral gentrification. Hollywood and indie films in the Boston Gothic mode trade in tropes of class aspiration, stasis, and descent. The Boston male, the “Masshole,” a genius at math or hockey or fishing, is pathologized: he needs to go to a shrink, or to AA, because he can no longer go to confession the way his grandfather did (see Spotlight). If he makes himself whole, he can win the love of a fancy woman, maybe one who goes to Harvard, or works for a bank, or is the therapist herself (the neat twist of The Departed). There is usually a foil who is satisfied with his lot—a life of backyard barbecues, getting wasted on weekends at the local tap, marrying one of his childhood neighbors and having a brood of kids like a good Catholic—or is perhaps fated to do time, like Christian Bale’s disgraced boxer Dicky in The Fighter. The lesson of these movies is that, while it may be hard to be a woman or a person of color from modest circumstances (as Billy tells his fellow trainee in The Departed: “You’re a black guy in Boston—you don’t need any help from me to be completely fucked”), it’s hard to be a white man, too, especially one burdened with talent. But transcendence is possible. There is obviously a market for this stuff. As a Masshole from Hopkinton (twenty-six miles west of the city, where the Boston Marathon starts), I can’t get

enough of these movies, but as a critic I wouldn’t normally waste three paragraphs of a novel review discussing popular Hollywood fare. It was with surprise, then, that these films came to mind when I opened The War for Gloria, the new book by Atticus Lish, whose first novel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014), was one of the finest of the past decade. Lish not only invokes, engages with, and subverts the modes of the Hollywood Boston Gothic—he dives headlong into them. Preparation for the Next Life, published by the independent Tyrant Books, was greeted with near-universal acclaim and awarded the 2015 PEN/ Faulkner Award and the 2016 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. The novel is a love story and a stylistic triumph. Part of its force comes from the way it defamiliarizes New York City, presenting it through the eyes of a pair of strangers who have come to town as if from the ends of the earth. Zou Lei, the daughter of a Muslim woman from northwestern China and a Han Chinese army sergeant, and Brad Skinner, a native of southwestern Pennsylvania who served three tours in Iraq, fall in love in Flushing, Queens, after meeting at the eatery where she makes noodles. They bond over a shared fondness for fitness, beer, and military life. Zou Lei is undocumented, has been detained in the United States by immigration authorities, and fears encounters with law enforcement. Skinner suffers from PTSD. Lish is an exquisite set piece writer, but the power of his narration, mostly in third person, except when one of the pair breaks out to tell a story in their speaking voice, comes from its restraint in the use of free indirect discourse. We may be inside their heads, seeing what they see, but their thoughts only come to us sparingly. Relentless access to the internal effusions of literary characters is so common in American fiction that Lish’s technique has a special force. Occasionally the perspective zooms out and we see the characters the way an onlooker might. Here is Skinner entering New York City, having just hitchhiked through Pennsylvania and New Jersey with a trucker: Now he was cutting through monumental project towers, his silhouette

distorted by what he was carrying, a burdened figure moving steadily across the great barren landscape of giant shadows and building structures and cold lights filtering down. A single car was parked against a line of gated storefronts exploding with graffiti— huge, wild, blazing— the letters pumped up like muscles about to burst, like smoke bulging, billowing, swelling in a bubble over the steel and concrete walls, like everything was on fire. He crossed the open area, a solitary figure carrying his gear, and reentered the shadow on the other side.

The effects are masterful, cinematic in the best way, with marks of the influence of DeLillo, Hemingway, and ultimately Gertrude Stein. Concrete realism is sometimes the term used for this style. Lish’s sentences are carved out of granite. At the sentence level, the same can be said of The War for Gloria. But the book is an unstable hybrid, unbearably poignant until it turns improbably pulpy, pitting a set of intricate characters against a pair of villains who seem to have escaped from a caricature factory managed by Charles Dickens in Hell. Both of the novel’s two main strands are nightmares: first, the slow decline of a single mother with ALS, the Gloria of the title, narrated in meticulous detail mostly, but not entirely, from the point of view of her teenage son; next, a thriller plot involving two murders and a suicide. The first is a cruel act of nature, a painful and humiliating ordeal that tests the characters’ capacities for mercy and care but then cannot be defeated or reversed. The second is a morality play in which blame can be laid, revenge can be had, and justice or its opposite might be served. Following one after the other, these plots constitute the sorrows of Corey Goltz, the teenage boy who unites them, and the moralized events of the second unfold as if they are psychic compensation for the inevitably fatal trajectory of the first. The real war in this book may be between genres: elegy and bildungsroman on the one hand and gothic thriller on the other. The clash is fascinating. The book’s primary zones of interest are Cambridge and Quincy, by the north and south ends of the MBTA’s

Red Line, respectively. I’ve lived in Cambridge and my grandfather lived in Quincy when I was a child in the Eighties, and I’ve never seen them evoked in such brilliant detail and with such total control on the page. The War for Gloria deserves a place beside David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, not to mention the crime novels of Dennis Lehane, Robert B. Parker, and George V. Higgins. These lists suggest that there are two main strands of Boston literature: one of shabby gentility, of characters with educations and aspirations at the edges of the middle class; and one of pulp fiction, of murder and mayhem across classes and among an underclass that survives on the borders of criminality. The War for Gloria partakes of both traditions.

n the early Nineties, Gloria Goltz comes east to Cambridge from Springfield to attend Lesley College, the teacher’s college between Harvard Square and Somerville on Massachusetts Avenue. Despite dreams of changing the world and overthrowing the patriarchy as a writer or scholar, she struggles in school, becomes an anarchist and a habitué of the pit by the Harvard Square T stop, a waitress, a barmaid, a barista, and will soon drop out. She is charmed by Leonard Agoglia, an eccentric security guard at MIT and a native of hardscrabble East Boston, who claims to be an amateur physicist, on the verge of proving the existence of multiple universes. The first affair results in a pregnancy she terminates without telling him; the second, begun in 1995, in a child he demands she keep. But Leonard does not stick around, and Gloria and her son, Corey, lead an itinerant and precarious life around Boston. The boy becomes the center of her life and her comfort when she gets “the blues.” There is, for a time, a romance with Joan, a roommate in Cleveland Circle, half-Japanese, who hails from the streets of Oakland and San Francisco. By the time the novel’s action begins, Gloria and Joan have split because of Gloria’s disinclination to cut Leonard out of her life, and Gloria and Corey are living in a house in Quincy. Obama is in office, and Corey is fifteen

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years old. It’s at this time that Gloria is diagnosed with ALS, the symptoms of which appear just as she’s resolved to resume her intellectual striving: “All of a sudden, all she wanted to do was write. That was when she noticed that the thumb on her left hand had stopped obeying her.” Over the three years of her illness, the “war for Gloria” will be fought between Corey, and sometimes Joan, on one side, and Leonard on the other. Gloria deteriorates, becomes sidelined from her job in social services, and goes on public assistance; Corey takes a series of jobs to help make ends meet, drops out of high school, and takes up martial arts, becoming a competitive cage fighter; Joan moves in with mother and son for a year but leaves after the ghosts of her shared past with Gloria return; Leonard also moves in for phases but is expelled by Corey after a pair of confrontations, the second of which leads to the teenager vandalizing his father’s car and facing arrest. Corey seeks out surrogate family members: “Corey had a lot of fathers—he found them ever ywhere.” Chief among them is Tom Hibbard, a widower and metalworker who helps him find his first jobs. In Tom’s daughter, Molly, a teenager a year ahead of him in school, he finds someone like a big sister who also becomes the object of his first romantic longings. And then, fatefully, there is Adrian Reinhardt, a boy a year older than Corey, a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School bound for MIT. Like Corey, Adrian is a loner with a fixation on fitness and a mother with a terminal disease. Both kids are trying to figure out how to be men after their de facto abandonment by bad fathers. In Corey’s world, Gloria, Joan, Tom, and Molly are generally benevolent presences: they help him in his struggles to grow and to care for his mother. They aren’t idealized figures but rounded characters, with flaws and quirks that bring to mind those of the initial romance between Zou Lei and Skinner in Preparation. Gloria has aspirations for Corey: that he’ll study hard, go to college, and have the kind of creative and political life she imagined for herself. Hers

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is the meritocratic dream of “getting out.” Joan, Tom, and Molly are happy enough to observe Corey maturing into a life of working-class dignity. Molly herself goes off to UMass Amherst, where she’s a track star, with plans to study small-business administration and return to work with her father. Lish’s writing about Corey’s work and his cage fighting displays a virtuosic level of detail as the boy undergoes trials and humiliations and learns how to keep his jobs and win his matches. Similarly fine is the attention Lish pays to Gloria’s decline: her falls, her loss of language, and at last her loss of mobility. The portrait is heartbreaking.

he father-son relationship between Leonard and Corey has a different cast. Leonard speaks in rhythms that set him apart from almost everyone else in the book. He has charisma, and Gloria, “his biggest champion,” never quite comes out from under his spell. He cultivates an air of thwarted genius: he could have been a second Richard Feynman, or a valiant cop, or a master criminal like Whitey Bulger. “If you listened to the story of Leonard’s life as Gloria told it,” Lish writes, “apparently Leonard had discovered his gift for scientific thought much the same way Siddhartha had found enlightenment one day beneath the banyan tree.” (Gloria’s Buddhism is a tentative inheritance of Corey’s, something the teenager picks up and puts down.) That Leonard is able to pursue his shadowy study of physics even as he works during the day as a campus cop prompts Corey to think that, more than once, “he had heard his mother and her friends comparing Leonard to Good Will Hunting.” The invocation of Good Will Hunting is striking because, as the novel goes on, it becomes clear that Lish has conceived of Leonard as a sort of Bad Will Hunting, a grunt with fraudulent pretensions, whose implausible dreams of advancing far beyond his station have distorted his personality and turned him into not just a crank, but a menace. For a time, Corey basks in his glow and listens, rapt, to his monologues: “Look, Corey, you have to understand: I grew up different from you. It was a very different time. We had rum-

bles. . . . I got called every name in the book: pinko, commie. I had these kids in my school who were dead set on fighting me. . . . I said we could fight, but we had to go to this place I knew. We had these marshes, these flats where I dug for clams. I knew exactly how far away it was; it was two miles exactly from where we were. I thought they’d say forget it and the fight would be off. But they were willing to walk the whole two miles for the chance to beat up a communist.” “What happened?” “The fight didn’t go the way they thought it would.” “You mean, you beat up two guys?” “I find that when you know boxing and wrestling, you can do pretty well in most fights, and I knew boxing and wrestling.” “That’s so awesome,” Corey said.

The conversation goes on, and Leonard reveals both jealousy of Corey’s relationship with Gloria and a sadistic streak: “I talked a certain somebody out of flushing you,” he tells the boy. Corey responds: “Your parents didn’t like you either, so I guess we’re the same.” The terror Corey feels that he and his father might be “the same” has a parallel in Corey’s friendship with Adrian. A middle-class child of divorced parents, Adrian studies physics and math beyond classroom demands, works out obsessively, and has an idiosyncratic theory of personal hygiene designed to keep others away from him—he never bathes, smells awful, and farts obstreperously. He wears a cup everywhere to protect his genitals: he suffers from a castration fear directed at his mother (who he remembers putting on a Halloween mask and attacking him with scissors when he was a boy), his father (who once took him to an Ohio whorehouse, where he caught the clap), and women generally. He exposes himself to women in public. He keeps rotting meat from the cafeteria tacked to the bulletin board by his desk in his dorm, where he is a pariah. Notwithstanding a brief fling with a classmate and fellow weirdo during his sophomore year at MIT, Adrian is shunned by women, fears them, and views them with contempt. There’s a word to describe Adrian, one Lish must have had in mind: he is an incel.

At first Adrian seems a darkly comic character, pathetic if not exactly sympathetic. Corey is drawn to him for his oddness, his intensity, and their shared status as outcasts, but he’s put off by Adrian’s public exposure on the Charles River Esplanade, by his expressions of hatred for his own mother (who happens to be undergoing chemotherapy), and by the mounting sense that Adrian is simply selfish and a bad friend. If The War for Gloria were merely a bildungs roman with elements of tragic elegy, we might expect some comic and harmless resolution to their relationship. (For hundreds of pages, that’s what I was expecting.) Instead, Adrian becomes a sort of protégé to Leonard. They watch pornography together on campus, and visit strip clubs on the outskirts of Boston. It’s difficult to tell at first whether their pairing is a means of bringing in morbid comic relief during Gloria’s decline, or whether the duo constitute Chekhov’s gun, with Leonard’s idle comments about crime and punishment catalyzing Adrian’s overactive misogynist imagination. In the end, Adrian’s transformation from frustrated weirdo into psycho killer happens abruptly, and largely offstage, as if Leonard, who likes to ramble on about murder, possesses demonic powers of suggestion. Suddenly we have been shoved into a different kind of book with a different relationship to language. Lish has a great lyrical talent, one on display in restrained flashes throughout. He describes Leonard’s relations with Gloria: “His tie to Corey’s mother had stretched and attenuated over the miles and years like a strand of spiderweb, floating invisibly in the atmosphere until it touched the face.” One afternoon, Corey finds Molly at home sunbathing, and his callused hand brushes her hip: “Across the border of the nylon, her skin was smooth as a space-age polymer. It was only possible to invent that polymer by playing with millions of atoms for millions of years.” There is an aesthetic faculty at work here, one with resources in language beyond the thoughts in the characters’ heads. That intelligence is still oper-

ational when the novel turns to its murder plot, but the lyricism coarsens and becomes grotesque. Here is the discovery of Adrian’s corpse: Cambridge Fire Rescue found Adrian inside his mother’s walls. Large fuzzy pink curtains of fiberglass insulation obscured his body. A fireman moved them aside and found the MIT student bent backwards with his legs pinned by the F-150’s still-hot grill. His head was covered in plaster dust like a kabuki dancer’s. Pink strands of fiberglass stuck to his whiskers. The top of his skull had ruptured. An oval of bone was missing from above his hairline, and a pink bubblegum-colored tongue of meat had jumped from his head—like a frog shooting its tongue at a fly. The meat was his brain and it had intestinal coils.

That “pink bubblegum-colored tongue of meat,” a frog’s tongue from the head of a kabuki dancer that is actually the fragment of a brain—a mind the writer of these words has shown us in glimpses before orchestrating its owner’s death. What a gruesome end for a once promising, if disturbed, young man. And what a strange genius, this author, of a novel full of such tenderness and violence, such oedipal love and oedipal rage. Its last pages are a fantasy of Corey’s future as he’s about to enlist in the Navy with aspirations of becoming a SEAL and hunting down evil men, men he imagines to be like his father. He dreams too of a woman, a scholar who will analyze his war, someone very much like Gloria: “My mother could have done that, he thinks. She could have overcome herself.” Overcoming yourself—is that what this is all about? While Gloria and her friends were calling Leonard Good Will Hunting, was she the real secret genius? Corey’s not so secret talent is for suffering and fighting, themes that also enchant Atticus Lish. As Corey takes the oath of service in the book’s last lines, it’s hard not to imagine a future of pain and nightmares awaiting him, a future not unlike Brad Skinner’s in Preparation for the Next Life. But what choice does he have? When all your family and all your friends are dead or estranged, there’s only one thing to do: get the hell out of Boston. Q

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DEEDS OF DERRING-DO Jon McGregor’s Antarctic experiment By Christopher Tayler Discussed in this essay:

Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor. Catapult. 288 pages. $26.

n the background of Lean Fall Stand, the En glish writer Jon McGregor’s new novel, there’s an aspect of British culture that might seem strange to outsiders: the country’s obsession with polar exploration as a test of national character. The obsession runs back through the nineteenth century, but at its center is Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who reached the South Pole in January 1912, only to find that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had arrived a month earlier. Scott and his four companions then died on the return journey in a style that spoke directly to the British love of heroic failure and stoic understatement. So indelible were the frostbitten Lawrence Oates’s last words as he left their tent to vanish in a blizzard rather than burden the others—“I am just going outside and may be some time”—that the men’s status as noble victims of bad luck was rarely questioned. It wasn’t until 1979 that a debunking biographer, Roland Huntford, began to steer conventional wisdom round to the idea that Scott hadn’t been a particularly well-prepared or competent explorer. Looking back, it’s somewhat surprising that Scott’s renown made it past the First World War. It’s easy, now, to see analogies between the hidebound military leaders who supervised the disaster in Europe and the attitudes that doomed Scott’s party. Dogsledding and Inuit survival techniques worked well for the Norwegians, but there was a feeling, shared by Scott, that hauling your supplies on a heavy sled yourself was the only way for Englishmen to comport themselves at the Poles. It would be a valuable display of self-reliance, one of Scott’s men remarked, “in these days

Christopher Tayler is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

of the supposed decadence of the British race.” Scott’s chief backer, Sir Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society, was similarly attached to the “man-hauling” system of the 1850s, and wasn’t a fan of the modern world in general. For Markham, scientific research was just a pretext. The real utility of polar expeditions, he wrote, lay in the “opportunities for young naval officers to acquire valuable experiences and to perform deeds of derring doe.” In other words, boyish, retrograde fantasies played their part in the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. As Francis Spufford put it in a study of British polar imaginings—a book called, as it had to be, I May Be Some Time—there was a “water-marking of unreality” around the whole enterprise. Along with the pure abstraction of racing to an invisible coordinate in an uninhabitable wilderness, this made the Scott story prime material for mythmaking, and no one understood this better than Scott himself. As he and his two remaining men froze to death, he went on a fantastically eloquent writing jag, defending his management of the expedition, pleading for pensions for their widows, and saying his goodbyes. The last page of his journal—recovered by a search party eight months later— ends with a scribbled postscript: “For God’s sake look after our people.” Scott’s grasp of logistics might have let him down, but his grasp of language didn’t, and he was able to set the terms by which his story would be told.

ean Fall Stand opens in a remote corner of Antarctica toward the end of the 2010s as three Englishmen find themselves in a tight spot. Two of them, Thomas Myers and Luke Adebayo, are postdoctoral researchers on their first visit to

the continent. The third, Robert Wright, known to his colleagues as Doc, is a field guide with the title of general technical assistant, a veteran of thirty-three seasons there. They work for something called the Institute, based in Cambridge, a fictional outfit that’s not to be confused with the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. On an afternoon “given over to recreational activity”—the language is that of the self-justifying field report that Doc will soon be composing in his head—they have gone down to the shoreline “with the principal intention of facilitating Thomas’s photography interests.” Luke waits by his snowmobile. Thomas walks out on the sea ice. Doc climbs a nearby promontory to give Thomas’s shots a sense of scale. Then a storm sweeps in, reducing visibility to zero and knocking each of them flat. In the carefully choreographed sequence that follows—perhaps the most stressful opening of an upmarket English novel since the hot-air balloon accident that begins Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love—McGregor uses flashbacks to fill the reader in on the workings of this small group. Low-level misunderstandings have permeated their time at Station K, a field hut hundreds of miles from the nearest base. The two Antarctic greenhorns are GPS technicians. Their job is to improve the mapping of this portion of the world, which Doc remembers people doing with theodolites, on foot. He discourages the pair from speaking of mistakes, insisting that they use the word “anomaly” instead. (Later, his wife will use the same word to describe their marriage.) The two technicians are millennials who say things like “Lol out loud, mate,” and amuse themselves with ribald innuendos about Doc’s suggestion that they debrief one another every night. The Antarctic term for rations, “manfood,” amuses them, too. Doc, who’s impervious to irony, eventually works out why they’re asking him if the term isn’t “problematic”: “I think you’re reading too much into it.” “Do you?” “I mean, we’ve actually had some excellent women working for the Institute, in more recent years. Some of them have even worked as GTAs.” “Very modern.”

“You wouldn’t know the difference, with some of them.” “You wouldn’t know the difference?” “No, not at all. Honorary men, effectively.”

In another excruciating scene, Doc turns to Luke—who, it’s been made clear indirectly, is of Nigerian descent—and asks him where his family are from. Luke tells him they’re from South London. Doc presses him: “Where are they from originally, though?” Luke shuts him down, snapping that they’re from Norway. Doc responds with literal-minded incredulity. These “OK, Boomer” moments don’t affect their working relationship. Doc is an excellent field guide. The younger men are slightly self-conscious about standing on mythic ground: even the phrase “unloading the stores from the hold” gives Luke a covert thrill. In the evenings, Doc reminisces—a bit repetitively, if they’re honest—about old Antarctica hands with names like Planky Carruthers, or expands on his dislike of modernities. Life in Cambridge is all “gas bills and nonsense”: “new roads, new estates, buildings knocked down and thrown up.” In Antarctica, “nothing changes.” The

land has “purity; simplicity. It’s difficult to explain.” Asked how his wife feels about all this, he says they have “an understanding.” Thomas notices that Doc starts drinking quite early, and that he rarely charges the satellite phones, apparently regarding their use as cheating. But “he obviously knew his stuff. He would know how to get them out of a difficult situation.” When the storm rolls over them, the situation gets difficult very fast. Their problems understanding one another on a social level are replaced by more urgent communication problems. Thomas can’t find his radio, and Doc is too busy trying not to get blown off a cliff to answer his. Worse, a brief lull reveals that the storm has broken up the sea ice. Luke sees Thomas drifting out into the bay on an ice floe. Then everything goes white again. Now we cut back to Thomas’s point of view. He has found his radio, and has noticed that a leopard seal, if not quite circling, is definitely “maintaining a presence.” They need to call in airborne help, but no one has a working sat phone, and Luke isn’t sure he’ll be able to find the hut, where there’s a high-frequency transmitter. At this

point, Doc’s voice comes over the radio. “Stand by for a brief quickening,” he says. “Situation upstate.” This opening section of the novel ends with a passage written in close third person, dipping in and out of Doc’s interior monologue, as he crashes into the hut, then fails to summon help: He looked at the radio. There was something he needed to do. He crossed the floor of the hut to the window. It was a long way. Everything leaned over to the right. The floor rose and fell. The glass was cold against his face. The weather was solid. They were good lads but this was their first season south. They didn’t yet have that indistinct. The cold was glass against his face. It was not unpleasant. He leaned into it. He waited.

He has had a stroke while battling the storm, and aphasia is rapidly taking away his language.

orn in 1976, Jon McGregor has won the sort of admiration worth having—his fans include George Saunders, Yiyun Li, Teju Cole, and Hilary Mantel—with an unusual combination of self-effacing craftsmanship and formal experimentation. He’s

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also an exception to the general rule in English literary culture that the center of the universe is in or near London. He grew up in Norwich and Thetford, studied in Bradford, and now lives and teaches in Nottingham. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things— which was published in 2002, and made the Booker longlist—describes a single day on a single street in a suburb of an unnamed, deindustrialized, northern English city. Such cities are often stereotyped as unglamorous, and reviewers have tended to highlight McGregor’s interest in “ordinary people.” It’s meant as praise, but as he has complained from time to time, it involves assumptions about some people being more ordinary than others. It could be construed as code for “provincial people,” or “people who aren’t comfortably middle class.” The late critic Eileen Battersby took a different approach in a remarkably uncharitable review of McGregor’s first novel for the Irish Times. It was “a pretentious parade of heavily intense gestures,” she wrote, accusing McGregor of archness, boringness, schematic plot construction, aiming for cinematic rather than novelistic effects, and overwriting. McGregor took some of these strictures on board, and won Battersby round with the plainer style of his third novel, Even the Dogs—an account, published in 2010, of the lives of homeless heroin addicts and alcoholics in an unnamed city in the Midlands—which owed something to Raymond Carver, and to the Scottish writer James Kelman’s use of a vernacular speaking voice. But he had the sense to ignore her when it came to the qualities that made his first novel stand out. His work maintains an interest in nonconventional storytelling that isn’t obviously indebted to any particular modernist tradition; an attention to the way politics plays out in the lives of characters who aren’t defined by their regional, ethnic, or class identities; a fascination with freeze-frames, fastforwarding, and other narrative manipulations of time; and an emphasis on large ensemble casts rather than a handful of individuals. His best novels also use conspicuously unanswered questions to lodge themselves in the reader’s memory. They’re the kind of books you find yourself thinking about at odd moments, months or years later. Even the Dogs

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

begins with the discovery of a corpse and ends with an inquest that doesn’t settle much, although the reader can piece together an explanation for a wave of overdoses in the city, and the story of the dead man’s descent into alcoholism, caused, in part, by an undiagnosed brain injury from the Falklands War. It’s narrated by a ghostly compound “we,” which functions sometimes like a chorus and sometimes like a description in a screenplay. Soon, distinct voices make themselves heard, and a set of characters comes into view: Robert, the dead man; Danny, a heroin addict from London; his tough friend Mike, a schizophrenic from Liverpool; Laura, who turns out to be Robert’s adult daughter; and so on. Each of these characters is carefully particularized—Steve, an alcoholic army veteran, always remembers to lay his socks out to dry before he passes out—and it’s usually possible to deduce a horrific personal backstory. The deindustrialization and unemployment associated with Thatcherism are there, too, if you care to look for them, but there’s no sense of points being hammered home, or, for that matter, of the frequent shifts in perspective and chronology being pursued as formalistic ends in themselves. The novel’s most audacious set piece—a woozy seven-page sequence that tracks the parallel journeys of a wounded British soldier and a shipment of heroin from a poppy field in Afghanistan’s Helmand province to the British Midlands—has the unsettling beauty and fluidity of an Adam Curtis montage (minus the portentous voiceover). It isn’t a comforting book, but McGregor uses great resourcefulness and empathy to coax a variegated set of voices from a monochrome landscape of “alleyways and open garages, railway arches, tunnels, derelict buildings, the backyards of offices and pubs.” Reservoir 13, published in 2017, has a wider social canvas and tonal range, but in one sense it’s even more uncompromising. It begins like a crime novel, or a drama series descended from Twin Peaks, with searchers combing the moors for Becky Shaw, a thirteen-year-old girl from London who has disappeared during a family walk in the Peak District—an upland region between Manchester and Sheffield popular with

hikers, and riddled with abandoned mines and quarries as well as ravines and bogs. (The novel’s evocation of place involves a feeling for the way this apparently pastoral landscape has been shaped by industrial activity, starting with the reservoirs of the title.) It’s possible that Becky has had an accident involving one of these features, but it’s also possible that someone has kidnapped her, and in the opening chapter, which covers a year, we watch the investigation’s effect on the village. Twelve yearlong chapters follow, and the incident fades into memory. We never find out what happened to Becky Shaw.

danger with this strategy is that the reader will feel cheated, and some do. The frustration is all the sharper thanks to the novel’s powerful illusion of reality: you start believing in the characters and the setting so much that it’s hard not to imagine Becky’s fate would be determinable if you could only tilt the perspective by a couple of degrees. There’s a hypnotic annual cycle of lambing and cricket matches and New Year’s Eve fireworks, but also a convincing impression of time passing in a linear way. We watch the teenagers who knew Becky grow up and leave for university, while other characters pair up or divorce or die or have passive-aggressive feuds about vegetable gardening. Male violence is always hovering near the edge of the picture, but there are moments of warmth and humor too, and the writing is unobtrusively extraordinary. It uses plain, precise sentences and a large helping of the passive voice to convey a kind of collective consciousness, one that encompasses the natural world as well as local gossip: In the beech wood the foxes ran through the night. The cubs were now as big as the adults and were striking out on their own. They would soon be seen as competition. There was play but it took on a fierce edge and there were fights that ended in blood. The edges of the territory were understood. In the evenings now the noise of people talking outside the Gladstone was louder on account of the smoking ban, and no matter how many notices Tony put up he still had complaints from the parish council. Some people had no idea how their voices carried.

Aspects of our nation at risk The flavor is difficult to get across in a short quotation—a typical paragraph is two or three pages long, its crosscuts held together by a steady rhythm—but, somehow, the idiom never seems gimmicky, just as the mystery of Becky’s disappearance charges every detail with potential meaning in a way that somehow bypasses “heavily intense gestures.” It’s a haunting book.

here are sentences in Lean Fall Stand that, apart from a few small details, could have come from Reservoir 13: “There was movement in the water, and the sky darkened above the glacier. A weather system moved in from the ridge.” Like those of the earlier novels, the new book’s cardinal themes turn out to be very different from those suggested by its opening. But it’s a jumpier, less cohesive story, with different styles and texture on offer, and a reconfigured cast in each of its three main sections. Doc’s wife, Anna, who calls him Robert—as the novel does once he’s left Antarctica— becomes the focal character in the middle section, in which Robert has been airlifted to a hospital in Chile and can only say things like “Wh, whuh. Whuuuh.” On top of Robert’s loss of speech, she has to come to terms with the expectation that she’ll uncomplainingly become his caregiver once he’s well enough to return to Cambridge. The novel’s final section rotates among three women, as the first section initially rotated among three men. The women are Anna, Amira, and Liz; the last two run a support group for aphasic stroke victims, where Robert slowly learns to articulate his story, after a fashion, to others and himself. Anna turns out to be a climate scientist, a specialist in oceanographic modeling. She and Robert met in Cambridge in 1984, when he was losing interest in his PhD and considering a job with the Institute instead. She liked the way he asked questions and listened to her answers. “Later—too late—she’d watched him performing this listening for other people and realised it was something he knew how to turn on and off.” They married because it was convenient. She could get on with her research, and “they could put off having children until much later, if at all.” Sooner than expected, however, they

did have children, who, in time, resented their father’s absences. Then there was the matter of Tim Carruthers, aka Planky, Anna’s best friend’s husband, who froze to death in a crevasse while out on an unnecessary joyride with Robert. Anna and Robert both think back to Tim’s funeral. In Robert’s recollection, the women were rather difficult about it: At the funeral Anna telling him she knew this was what he wanted. What did she mean, he’d asked her; what was it he wanted? All this. White lilies in vases, varnished coffin, colleagues in funeral black, lonely widow stooping low. The heroic death. For God’s sake look after my people. All that. The organ playing, and the sunlight streaming through the high chapel windows. I’d prefer to be buried down south, he told her. It was a joke but it went unappreciated.

Now Robert’s people are being asked to do the looking after, and for all his earlier talk of “sacrifices to make,” and “how important his work was,” it’s Anna who’s having to step back from an academic project that’s meant to be informing the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By comparison, Robert’s work in Antarctica looks like little more than a pretext for deeds of derring-do. Anna isn’t even sure she wants him to come home.

n one level, Lean Fall Stand is concerned with the idea of heroism, and what McGregor has called “the heroism of care.” In the opening section, Robert’s masculine ideals—complete with a lifethreatening nostalgia for older ways of doing things, and a feeling that the younger men are insufficiently self-reliant—lead to disaster, and Thomas doesn’t make it back from Antarctica alive. In the closing section, Robert can take charge of his identity again thanks only to the communal endeavors of the female therapists and caregivers. This would seem to offer Anna a somewhat restrictive model of female heroism, so McGregor is careful to make her a complex character, ambiguous in her responses, withdrawn, and as bad as Robert is at reading social cues. When Luke lies to protect Robert

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during the inquest into Thomas’s death, it doesn’t occur to her that this might be a moral problem. Robert, however, is a simpler character. Until aphasia makes his thoughts a mystery, he comes across as the sort of person who’s chillingly exposed in early John le Carré novels: an emotionally evasive Englishman who has given all his loyalties to the Institute and to a dream of adventure. In the last third of the novel, McGregor constructs a moving, well-observed drama of rehabilitation around him. There are some astonishing technical feats. As he did in Even the Dogs, for example, McGregor stealthily teaches you to recognize the characters’ verbal tics, so that, in the climactic supportgroup sequence, you’re able to follow interactions between the aphasic patients through the different kinds of word salad they produce. But there’s always a troubling undertow. It wasn’t just because of his stroke that Robert didn’t call in air support in time to save Thomas. He tried to rescue him instead, nearly killing himself and Luke, to conceal his earlier errors. “Whether he didn’t have the words or he didn’t want to use them was impossible to tell, now,” Anna thinks at one point. Throughout the book, McGregor returns to language’s incommensurability to experience. It’s iterated obsessively in many different ways, from the problem of describing the Antarctic landscape to the prose poetry spoken by the fluent aphasics in Robert’s support group. “Doc Wright kept trying to tell them things, but his words weren’t getting through,” McGregor

writes of the group’s noisy flight to Station K at the beginning of the story. On almost any given page, there will be a misunderstanding, a misreading of tone, a joke that doesn’t land, or someone “searching for the right words.” “No hablar,” a nurse explains in Chile. “Sin palabras.” Anna doesn’t speak Spanish but gets what she means. When the support group stages a trivia quiz, question nine is: “Who was the first man to reach the South Pole?” One man says, “Scott! Great Scott!” Another speaks a string of resonant nonsense. Robert can only say, “Am, am. Am.” It’s easy to imagine how McGregor might have arrived at this theme as a means of connecting the Antarctica material to the aphasia material. Whether or not it completely works, and whether or not you can sustain momentum while going from ice floes and leopard seals to a support group in Cambridge, the eerie withholding of moral judgment makes Robert’s failure of character difficult to forget. The novel ends with a flashback to Robert in Antarctica moments before the rescuers arrive. Almost completely wordless, unable to remember his own name or “bring to mind the people who would miss him when he didn’t get home,” Robert feels an ecstatic, almost pantheistic sense of oneness with the land. Something has gone wrong, he knows, but with equal certainty he feels that everything is as it ought to be. It’s a sign of McGregor’s skill, and his unforced sense of the mystery at the heart of things, that the novel leaves the reader feeling much the same way. Q

Harper’s Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. Tel: 212-420-5720. Andrew J. Bacevich, Chairman; John R. MacArthur, President; Rosa Brooks, Jackson Lears, and Rosanna Warren, Board Members. Copyright © 2021 by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. All rights reserved. The trademark Harper’s is used by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation under license and is a registered trademark owned by HarperCollins. The trademark Harper’s Index is a registered trademark owned by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. Printed in the United States. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. In Canada, second-class postage paid at Windsor, Ont. In Canada, International Publications Mail Agreement #40013802. Canadian GST 12477 4167 RT. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 885, Markham Station Main, Markham, Ont. L3P8M9. POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to Harper’s, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737. ISSN0017-789X. CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Please provide both address from last issue and new address. Allow six weeks’ advance notice. SUBSCRIPTIONS: $30 one year. Canada and United States possessions, add $3; other foreign, add $20 per year. Send orders to Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737. SUBSCRIPTION PROBLEMS: Write Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737, or call 800-444-4653, M–F, 8 AM –midnight, S&S, 9 AM –7 PM, EST. All requests for PERMISSIONS and REPRINTS must be made in writing to Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. The Readings in Harper’s Magazine every month include texts and documents found in the public domain, most of them abridged for reasons of space and not all of them reprinted with permission. Harper’s Magazine will not consider or return unsolicited non-fiction manuscripts that have not been preceded by a written query, but will consider unsolicited fiction. Unsolicited poetry will not be considered or returned. No queries or manuscripts will be considered unless they are accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Visit our website at www.harpers.org.

HP 94

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

PUZZLE 1

17 19

20 22

29 32

34 38

35 39

40 42

POSE By Richard E. Maltby Jr.

he unclued entry at 12A may seem like a clue to the remaining seven unclued entries, but it’s a pose. Clued answers include six proper nouns, one of which is an acronym. The entry at 17A is uncommon; 18A is not officially a word but should be. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 69. across 1. Child landed—airman is involved in controlling system (15) 12. (See instructions) (8, 6, 3) 16. An article rejected close to final events of the year (5) 17. Wing-back tackled in error—bad device for the Steelers! (8) 18. Picky, in a way, goes wearily off to get quiet (9) 20. Poses moving ending for The Searchers (5) 22. Order an L.A.-based side (4, 5) 25. Rose by any other name is one taken inside, sadly (5) 27. Head of Paramount, with humble origin, first to cut a film (5) 28. One might occur at a séance, two at a funeral! (3) 29. Urge to leave on notice (4) 31. Hobo on the move acquires a friend, gets promotion (8) 32. Group of ladies with pasts, mostly shady (3) 33. Irregular size? Get it! It’s the flavor of the month! (9) 36. Headed off escapee from Javert, edifyingly (7) 38. It’s the last word in French films. Also English. Excellent (4) 39. Prize named in part for a Japanese school (3) 40. One not in favor of migrating visitant? (8) 41. Being smoking-hot makes Rod prompt in bed (9)

42. down 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 26. 29. 30. 31. 34. 35. 37. 38.

Doctor crosses menthol with a bit of nicotine—creates a mystery (4, 4, 7) Having a key to opening of new-age locks (5) Keep heading out of town (3) What puts a hole in your plans? Sounds like everything (3) (See instructions) (8) Trying one royal, then another (6) (See instructions) (6) Rams, losing millions, bank not very often (6) Where cold won’t go away, try ipecac (6) (See instructions) (8) Dwelling with elevated private bathroom (5) Some confusion takes place in The Simpsons (4) (See instructions) (9) Any changes? No (3) With Southern base, Democrat surprisingly insisted they agitate (10) (See instructions) (9) (See instructions) (7) (See instructions) (4, 3) Something worn over the shoulder naked. Price? Unlimited! (7) Snap selfie with number from Cats (7) Native Midwesterners find motor home! (3) Stage left and right—penetrating, fiery, moving material for the lead (6) Piece of a gangster story that leaves you, not oddly, aghast (3) Gets up a tree but not around branches (5) Second-stringers met up about a baseball leader getting top position (1-4) Take sides in simple contest—this is an order (4) Rebel uprising—disheartening, not a good look (4) A German admirer’s heart, caught in the extremes of emotion (3) Back for repairs (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Pose,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you al-

ready subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by September 10. The sender of the first correct solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winner’s name will be printed in the November issue. The winner of the July puzzle, “Crazy Quilt,” is Joseph Schrader, Hillsboro, Ore. PUZZLE

FINDINGS L ife expectancy in the United States declined between 2018 and 2020 by 3.88 years for Hispanics, 3.25 years for blacks, and 1.36 years for non-Hispanic whites; in peer countries, the average overall decline was 0.22 years. Banded mongoose societies distribute resources equally because parents do not know who their children are. A study of ninety-eight fruit fly societies populated with clones demonstrated that the same clones consistently became the most popular flies. Hunger causes male fruit flies to fight among themselves. A single female worker Cape honey bee who cloned herself in 1990 has hundreds of millions of clone descendants, some of whom became queens. The introduction of an assassin bug among broad-horned flour beetles reversed sexual selection and led to fitter females. Dragon Man (Homo longi), a species with square eye sockets and large teeth, was proposed to be the closest relative of Homo sapiens. Iceberg scours in the Florida Keys were dated to 29,000 bc. The Maori may have reached Antarctica in the seventh century. An analysis of pottery residues from ninth- to twelfth-century Palermo suggested that fish was unpopular in medieval Islamic cuisine. British chickens from the Iron Age through the Saxon period tended to live long lives because they were sacred. An Egyptian vulture was seen in Britain for the first time since 1868. A plague of bunions in Cambridge at the turn of the fourteenth century was blamed on a craze for pointy shoes.

Ithatn Indonesia, where coral growth patterns indicated a thirty-two-year earthquake had preceded the

Sumatra earthquake of 1861, a meteor appeared to have fallen into an active volcano. Evidence grew stronger

that the Younger Dryas Impact spurred the formation of sedentary human civilization. A survey of spiders who prey on snakes found that the victims can be up to a meter long and noted that tarantulas eat fer-de-lance and golden silk orb-weaver spiders eat eyelash vipers. Snakes will decline to attack if they are running low on venom. Pharmacologists were optimistic about treating irritable bowel syndrome with tarantula venom. A single dose of laughing gas can alleviate treatmentresistant depression. Childhood trauma makes morphine more pleasurable, SSRIs make crayfish too outgoing, and marijuana makes lobsters slower but does not significantly alter their response to being boiled alive.

T he twenty-eight Tasmanian devils introduced to Maria Island in an effort to save them from facial cancer were

found to have killed three thousand pairs of little penguins. The feathers of Australian red-backed fairy wrens have gotten duller to blend in with wildfire-scorched habitats. Monarch butterflies raised in captivity can still figure out how to migrate south. Female seahorses will move on to mate with new males if they become unable to smell their current mates. Marine biologists spent five years training snowflake moray eels to slither up a ramp, demonstrating that the eels’ second set of jaws works equally well on land. Nuclear-blast detectors picked up the signature of a new population of pygmy blue whales and the infrasonic rumblings of 1,001 rocket launches. Worms and Jeff Bezos were to be sent into space. Scientists worried that humans could take advantage of benevolent AI and suggested that an autonomous robot could re-create Earth’s primordial soup. Researchers from fourteen countries agreed that we are all going to die. Q

Vera, a painting by Santiago Giralda, whose work is on view at Galerie Isa, in Mumbai, India. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isa, Mumbai, India 96

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2021

View the incredible work of Nikki McClure and over a hundred hand-picked, independent artists. ®æ˵ņæʦÚæėæÙņÂŖąĢúʦɓɓʦŷæÂņōʦīùʦÚīĢĢæÚŖąĢúʦŷīŝʦűąŖĀʦ ÂņŖʦŖĀÂŖʦąĢōŃąņæōʦűīĢàæņʫʦÙņąĢúōʦÂʦōĠąėæʦŖīʦŷīŝņʦ ùÂÚæʦÂĢàʦæĢÚīŝņÂúæōʦŷīŝʦŖīʦÙæʦűĀīʦŷīŝʦÂņæʪ ĀīŃʦīĢėąĢæʦɓɕʷɘʦÂŖʦÙŝŷīėŷĠŃąÂʪÚīĠʦ

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